I Wanted To Show Them Somewhere Better

There is a place in your head and everything gets measured against it.

Wherever you grew up. The particular quality of light there. The distances. The way a person could walk for an hour and not see a road.

And then there is the street outside your door, which is not that, and never has been, and never will be.

So every time somebody says shall we go out, a comparison happens in about half a second, and the comparison always comes back the same way, and the result is that you have taken your children almost nowhere.

And the odd part is that you are not snobbish about it. You do not think your street is beneath you. You have simply not been able to make yourself believe that a walk on it counts as taking your children outdoors.

I want to go at that directly, because I think there is a real thing underneath it that has never been named.

Are not Abana and Pharpar better

There is a moment in Kings where a man is offered something ordinary and is genuinely offended by it.

Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage. (2 Kings 5:12, King James Version)

Are not Abana and Pharpar better.

And here is the thing that makes this so useful: he is right. Those rivers were better. Damascus had proper rivers and the Jordan is a muddy little thing, and Naaman is not being stupid, he is being accurate.

You are not wrong about the comparison, and it was never an error of judgment to know that one place is finer than another. 2 Kings 5:12 records a completely accurate complaint without correcting the facts of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as understanding rather than as a rebuke.

And what goes wrong is not his geography. It is that he requires the place to be worthy of what he came for. He has attached the value of the thing to the quality of the location, and that attachment is the only thing standing between him and what he wants.

You have attached a value to a place, and it was never the place that carried anything. The written word leaves his assessment of the rivers standing and moves the whole matter off the water, and the Spirit of God is what quietly detaches a man's children from his childhood terrain.

What you are actually grieving

Now let me name what I think is underneath this, because I do not believe it is really about scenery.

This was never about giving your children a view. It is about giving them what that place gave you, and what it gave you was not the landscape.

It was hours. It was being unsupervised. It was a particular kind of ordinary freedom that happened to occur in that setting and could have occurred in a hundred others.

You are holding the ingredient already, and it was never the scenery that anybody was actually given. 2 Kings 5 puts the whole cleansing outside the merit of the river, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what he was really handed as a boy.

And every part of that is available on your street. But because it arrived inside a landscape, the landscape has come to feel like the ingredient, and the sourcing has been aimed at something that was never the active component.

The place is not required to be worthy, and a street that is not the one you came from is not a poor imitation of it.

You are able to hand over the thing without the setting, and it was never the country that made any of it work. 2 Kings 5 moves the cleansing entirely off the quality of the river, which is exactly why the Spirit of God is unbothered by a city block.

And there is grief in this, and I do not want to skip it. That place is gone, for you, and your children will never have it, and that is a real loss and it is allowed to be one. It is just not a reason for them to have nothing.

Walk the block

So here is the practical part and it has one prohibition in it.

Walk your own block, for twenty minutes, with one of them. And do not compare it to anywhere, out loud or in your head.

You are able to walk a street without measuring it, and it has never once been dishonest to stop running a comparison nobody else can see. The passage leaves the rivers of Damascus exactly as good as they were and puts the whole matter elsewhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man walking a road he did not choose.

Particularly: do not tell them about where you grew up. Not on the walk. That is the comparison escaping into speech, and what a child receives is that this place is the lesser one and they are being given the lesser thing.

Later, at a table, tell them everything. Those stories are good and they should have them. Just not while you are standing on the street that is being compared.

You are able to keep the two apart, and it has never once required you to give up your own childhood to give them theirs. 2 Kings 5:12 lets a man be right about the rivers and still miss what he came for, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a good memory from becoming a measurement.