Nothing Ever Happens On Our Street

You have said it so many times that it has stopped being an opinion.

There is nothing round here. Nothing ever happens on our street. There is nowhere to take them.

And I want to ask one question about that, and it is not whether it is true. It is: when did you last look?

Not walk along it. Look at it. Stop in the middle of your own road and actually examine what is there, the way you would in a place you had arrived at for the first time.

Because I suspect the honest answer is a very long time ago, possibly before your children were born, and that a certainty which has never been tested has been running your family's whole outdoor life for years.

And I knew it not

There is a sentence in Genesis that a man says out loud after sleeping on the ground with a stone under his head.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. (Genesis 28:16, King James Version)

Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not.

Read what he is not saying. He is not saying the place changed. He is not saying something arrived overnight. The place was exactly the same place when he lay down on it, unimpressive, chosen because it got dark and he had to stop somewhere.

What changed is that he found out what was there.

You are looking at a man discovering a place rather than being given a new one, and it was never the ground that altered. Genesis 28:16 has the change happen entirely in the knowing and not at all in the location, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as possibility rather than as a reproach for not noticing.

And notice how ordinary his reason for being there was. There is nothing devotional about it. The sun went down. That was the whole of the site selection, and it turned out to be the gate of heaven.

You have a street chosen by nothing more than where you could afford to live, and it was never the manner of arriving that decided what is there. The written word puts the discovery on the most arbitrary possible spot, and the Spirit of God is what stops a man ruling out his own road on the grounds of how he came to be on it.

An untested certainty

Now the practical heart of it, and it is about how certainties work rather than about your street.

A belief that is never tested does not stay still. It hardens.

You concluded there was nothing here at some point, probably fairly, based on what you knew at the time. And because the conclusion was reached, the looking stopped. And because the looking stopped, no new information has arrived in about nine years, and the conclusion has been sitting there getting more solid the whole time on no additional evidence at all.

The certainty was never tested, and a place you have stopped looking at is not the same as a place with nothing in it.

You are not living somewhere empty, and it was never established by anybody that there is nothing here. Genesis 28 has a man wake up on ordinary ground and find out what it was, which is exactly why the Spirit of God keeps sending a father back onto his own street rather than off it.

And here is what your children have been receiving all this time, which is the part that matters most. They have been given a place with a verdict already attached. They do not look either, because looking has been shown to be pointless, and the two of you have been walking past the same things for years in agreement.

Three things nobody here has noticed

So the practical part, and it is a task rather than an attitude.

Walk your own street for twenty minutes and find three things nobody in this house has ever noticed before.

You are able to test a nine year old conclusion in twenty minutes, and it has never once required a different street to find out. The passage records a discovery made on ground the man had already lain down on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is out with a father looking properly at a road he knows.

Three. Not one, because one can be a fluke, and not ten, because ten is a project. Three things, and they can be tiny. A date on a wall. A different kind of window on one house. A tree growing out of something it should not be growing out of. A name carved in a step.

And take one of them with you, and make it their task too. Do not tell them what you are doing it for. Just say: three things we have never noticed.

You are handing them a way of looking, and it has never once needed anything remarkable to be there for that to be worth doing. Genesis 28:16 puts the whole thing in the knowing rather than in the ground, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a father and a child stopped in the middle of their own road.