I Have Walked This Street Since I Was Six

Seventy years on one road.

You were six when your family came here and you have gone up and down it, in every kind of weather, in every decade since, and you could walk the whole length of it with your eyes shut and know exactly where you were by the sound of your own feet.

And you have two thoughts about that, and they contradict each other, and you have never resolved them.

One is that it is a small life. That other people saw places and you saw one street.

The other one is quieter and you trust it less, and it says that you know something.

I would like to take the second one seriously for a few minutes, because I think it is right and I think you have never once been given a reason to believe it.

Ask for the old paths

There is an instruction in Jeremiah about looking backward, and it is more practical than it sounds.

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. (Jeremiah 6:16, King James Version)

Ask for the old paths.

Notice that this is an instruction to ask somebody. The old paths are not on a map and they are not obvious from standing there. They are held by people who walked them, and the only way to get at them is to ask a person who knows.

You are the one the asking was meant to reach, and it was never a map that carried what you have. Jeremiah 6:16 makes the old paths something a person has to be asked for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as value rather than as nostalgia.

And notice what is promised at the end of it. Rest for the souls. Not information. The finding of the old way is described as restful, which is a strange word to attach to local history until you think about what it is actually describing, which is knowing where you are.

You have something that settles people rather than merely informing them, and it was never a small thing to know exactly where you stand. The written word ties the old paths to rest rather than to knowledge, and the Spirit of God is what makes seventy years on one street a thing worth having.

Nobody has asked because nobody knows it is there

Now the practical heart of it, and it is not about your worth.

The reason nobody has asked you about that street is not that they are uninterested. It is that they do not know there is anything to ask about.

To your grandchildren, that road is scenery. It is the thing between the house and the other places. It has no history, because history is invisible unless somebody points at a wall and says what used to be behind it.

Seventy years on one street is a body of knowledge, and nobody has ever been asked for it because nobody knew it was there.

You are holding something that has never once been declined, and it was never rejected by anybody in this family. Jeremiah 6 puts the old paths in the keeping of somebody who has to be asked, which is exactly why the Spirit of God moves an old man to speak first rather than to wait.

And there is a second thing. You have been waiting to be asked because being asked would make it welcome, and offering it unasked feels like imposing. That is a decent instinct and it is costing everybody, because the asking cannot happen until somebody knows what to ask about.

One building, one fact, on foot

So here is the practical part, and it is small on purpose.

Walk your own street with one of them, and tell them one thing about one building.

You are able to hand it over one fact at a time, and it has never once required a long story to have passed something on. The passage puts the old paths in an exchange between people rather than in a record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with an old man saying one sentence outside a wall.

One thing. Not the history of the road. Not a tour. Point at a door and say what was there in 1963, and then keep walking and let it go.

The reason it has to be on foot and not at a table is that a building is the thing that makes it real. A story at a table is a story. A story outside the actual door is a place changing under somebody's feet, and that is what a child remembers.

You are changing a street under their feet when you do that, and it has never once needed more than a wall and a sentence. Jeremiah 6:16 says stand ye in the ways and see, which is done standing up and outdoors, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a road with a man pointing at a doorway.

And then next time, one more. Not a series. Not a project. Just one, on the days it comes up, until your grandchildren have a street with things in it.