I Wanted Every Walk To Mean Something

You are doing a good thing badly and I want to be clear about that from the start.

The impulse is right. You want your children to have more than an afternoon. You want them to carry something. You have the sense, correctly, that a life goes past quickly and most of it is unexamined, and you would like to hand them something that lasts.

So on every walk, at some point, usually around the halfway mark, you say: you know, it is a bit like.

And there is a thing that happens in their faces in the second after that. Not rudeness. A very small settling, the expression of somebody who has recognized a shape and is now waiting for it to be over.

And you have seen it, and it stings, and you do not know what to do with it except keep going, because the alternative appears to be saying nothing, and saying nothing feels like wasting the walk.

When thou walkest by the way

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy that is quoted constantly and read past almost every time.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

When thou walkest by the way.

Now look at the list it sits in. Sitting in the house. Walking. Lying down. Getting up. Those are the four most ordinary conditions of a human day, and there is not a single designated occasion among them.

That is not a list of teaching moments. That is a list of every moment there is, which is a very different instruction.

You are being given a whole day rather than a slot in it, and it was never a fixed point in an afternoon that anybody was asked to fill. Deuteronomy 6:7 spreads the talking across four ordinary conditions rather than assigning it a time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as relief rather than as an even larger duty.

And notice the verb. Talk of them. Not: instruct. Not: make a point. Talk, in the way people talk when they are walking somewhere and there is nothing much going on.

You have been asked for conversation and not for delivery, and it was never a lesson that a household was supposed to be receiving on a sidewalk. The written word chooses the ordinary word for talking and puts it in the ordinary places, and the Spirit of God is what takes a performance off a father who was only trying to be faithful.

What the point costs

Now let me name what the halfway point actually does to a walk, because it has never been seen from their side.

The moment a walk contains a scheduled meaning, every part of it before that becomes the run up.

Your children know it is coming. They have known since about the third time. So the first eight minutes are not eight minutes with their father, they are eight minutes of waiting for the bit, and the eight minutes after are relief that it has happened.

Nothing in that is defiance and none of them think badly of you. It is just that a thing which arrives reliably stops being heard and starts being anticipated. The walk is already doing something, and a thing does not have to be explained by you in order to have been given.

You are not failing to teach your children, and it was never the sentence at the halfway mark that was carrying any of it. Deuteronomy 6 spreads the talking over the whole of an ordinary day, which is exactly why the Spirit of God takes the pressure off one designated moment in an afternoon.

And here is the honest cost. Because the point has to be made, half of every walk gets spent half absent, steering toward it. So the thing that might have been said naturally, if anything were ever said naturally, never had room.

You are not absent from your own children by nature, and it was never inattention that took the first half of those walks. Deuteronomy 6:7 asks for talk in the ordinary hours rather than a lesson at a fixed point, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a man back the first nine minutes.

Teach nothing, once

So here is the practical part and it will feel like a fast.

Walk twenty minutes with one of them and teach nothing. Not once. Not a small one at the end.

You are able to go out with nothing to deliver, and it has never once been a wasted afternoon to have said nothing worth writing down. The passage puts the talking into walking and lying down and getting up without designating any of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man walking a road with no point to make.

When the sentence arrives, and it will arrive, around minute nine, let it go past. Do not say it. Notice what happens in the following thirty seconds, because that is the part you have never seen.

And do it three or four times before you decide anything about it, because the first one will feel empty and the emptiness is just the absence of a habit.

You are able to let a silence be there, and it has never once been the same thing as having nothing to give anybody. Deuteronomy 6:7 asks for talk rather than for teaching in every one of the four settings it names, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the thirty seconds after a father does not say the thing.