We Always Turn Left

Out of the door, and left.

Every time. For four years. Down to the junction, along, round by the school, back up the hill and home. Somewhere between forty and fifty minutes, or twenty if you cut it at the church.

And here is the question nobody in your house has ever asked: why left?

There is no reason. That is the answer. Nobody chose it. Some evening in the spring of a year you cannot name, you went left, probably because of something entirely temporary, and every walk since has been a copy of that walk.

So your family has a route, and the route was never decided, and it has been quietly setting the boundary of everything your children think of as around here.

Ye have compassed this mountain long enough

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy that is almost funny in how plain it is.

And the LORD spake unto me, saying, Ye have compassed this mountain long enough: turn you northward. (Deuteronomy 2:3, King James Version)

Ye have compassed this mountain long enough.

Notice what is not in that sentence. No rebuke. No explanation of what went wrong. No account of why they had been going round it. It is a plain observation about a loop and then a direction.

You are being given a direction and not a correction, and it was never a fault that put a family on the same circuit. Deuteronomy 2:3 states the looping and then turns them without any blame attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as an instruction rather than as an indictment.

And notice the size of the change. Turn you northward. Not: leave this region. Not: go somewhere worthy. One direction, from where they already were, with everything else the same.

You have been handed the smallest possible correction, and it was never a new place that anybody was being sent to. The written word changes the bearing and nothing else, and the Spirit of God is what makes a right turn at your own gate a large enough action.

A loop is a decision that stopped

Now let me name what a loop actually is, because it is not laziness.

A loop is a decision that was made once and then stopped being made.

The first time was a choice. The second time was a preference. By the fifth or sixth it had become the route, and after that nobody in your household has made a decision about direction in four years, including you, including the moment you walked out of the door last Sunday.

That is not a failure of imagination. It is what happens to any repeated action, and it is mostly a very useful feature of being a person, and it has one cost, which is that the boundary of the known world stops moving. The loop was never chosen, and turning the other way at your own gate is not starting again from nothing.

You are not stuck with anything, and it was never a decision that put you on that circuit in the first place. Deuteronomy 2 addresses a loop with a direction and does not require anybody to explain themselves, which is exactly why the Spirit of God can turn a household without any of it being a reckoning.

And think about what it means for your children. Everything on the left is their neighborhood. Everything on the right is theoretically the same distance from their front door and might as well be another county, because they have never been there on foot with a parent, which is the only way a place becomes yours.

Turn the other way

Here is the practical part and it is one word: right.

Out of the door, and turn the other way, and walk for twenty minutes and come back.

You are able to change the whole map with one turn, and it has never once required going anywhere new to have done it. The passage turns a people northward without moving them out of the region, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a father hesitating at his own gate.

Do not plan it. Do not look at anything first. The not knowing is a large part of what makes it work, because a route you do not know is a route you have to look at.

And expect somebody to object. Somebody will say this is the wrong way, and they will mean it, because for them it genuinely is. Say: I know, we are going this way today. Do not explain further.

You are able to make a small change without justifying it, and it has never once been necessary to defend a right turn to anybody. Deuteronomy 2:3 gives the new bearing with no reasoning attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on an unfamiliar stretch of a familiar neighborhood.

Then next time, left again if you like. This is not a replacement. It is the reopening of a decision that closed four years ago.