Four Streets Is All We Have

Everything you read assumes a car.

Not openly. It never says take the car. It says find a new place, try somewhere different, get out of the usual area, and every one of those is a sentence written by somebody who can get out of the usual area.

You have four streets. That is the actual size of the world available to you and three children on a Tuesday afternoon with no fare in your purse.

And the word that has attached itself to those four streets, over about two years, is only.

Only four streets. That is all we have. Just round here.

I want to go after that word, because I think it is doing more damage than the four streets ever could.

Though thou be little among the thousands

There is a line in Micah that takes the smallest place on a list and does something unexpected with it.

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel. (Micah 5:2, King James Version)

Though thou be little among the thousands.

Notice the prophet does not argue with the smallness. He grants it in the same breath. Bethlehem is little, it is little among thousands, and nobody is pretending otherwise.

You are not being told your four streets are secretly large, and it was never a denial of the size that changed anything. Micah 5:2 grants the littleness plainly before it says anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as honesty rather than as consolation.

And then the yet. The smallness is stated and then it turns out to be entirely beside the point, because what comes out of that place has nothing to do with how it ranked on a list of towns.

You have a place whose size was never the qualifying question, and it was never a ranking that decided what could happen there. The written word keeps the littleness and makes it irrelevant in the same sentence, and the Spirit of God is what takes the word only off four ordinary streets.

The word only is doing the damage

Now let me separate two things, because they have been traveling together and they should not be.

The first is a fact: four streets. That is true, it is not going to change this month, and no amount of encouragement makes a bus fare appear.

The second is a judgment: only. And that word is not in the fact. It got added, and it has been added so consistently that it now feels like part of the measurement.

Four streets is not a reduced version of anything, and the small place has never been the disqualified one.

You are not living in a smaller version of somebody else's life, and it was never a shortage that you have been going out into. Micah 5 grants the size and refuses to let it be the verdict, which is exactly why the Spirit of God will not leave the word only sitting on a woman's own neighborhood.

And here is what the word costs, practically. Every walk with only in it is a walk that starts in deficit. Nobody sets out well from a deficit. So four perfectly good streets have been receiving a family who arrive on them already disappointed, several times a week, for two years.

Say the number without the word

So the practical part, and it is one word long, or rather it is one word shorter.

Say it without only. To the children, to yourself, out loud: we are walking the four streets.

You are able to state a fact and leave the verdict off it, and it has never once been denial to stop adding a word that was not in the measurement. The passage names the littleness and then declines to draw the obvious conclusion from it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman saying a plain number without a judgment attached.

Then walk them, for twenty minutes, and do not apologize for the route at any point, in any form. Not out loud, not with a face, not with a small remark about how there is nowhere to go around here.

Your children take their reading of this place from you. They have nothing else to compare it to. Four streets with a mother who is not apologizing is a completely different childhood from four streets with a mother who is.

You are setting what those streets mean to them, and it was never the streets that were going to decide it. Micah 5:2 keeps the little town little and lets everything happen there anyway, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a familiar road with a woman who has stopped saying only.