He Misses The Thing He Left

There was an hour in that house when he was a boy.

Same hour, every single day. Everybody stopped for it. You could be halfway through anything and it did not matter, and it was not negotiable, and as a boy he found it about as interesting as furniture.

He threw the whole of it off at twenty six.

And he was right to. He wants that said before anything else, and this article is not going to argue with him about it. There were reasons, and the reasons were real, and if you knew them you would not tell him to go back either.

Here is what he cannot say.

He misses it.

Not the reasons. Not the things he left. The hour. The fact of it, the way a day had a spine in it, the way you could not drift past six o'clock without noticing you had.

And there is no way to say that out loud, because the moment he does, it sounds like a man edging back toward something everybody watched him leave, and two people at that table would be genuinely worried and one of them would be delighted for entirely the wrong reasons.

His cousin said something about the old days at Christmas.

He made a joke. Everybody laughed and it moved on and it took about four seconds.

And he sat there afterwards with a plate in his hand and realized he could have described that hour to you minute by minute, thirty years on, including what the light did in the room in October.

If you miss something you would not go back to, come and take a chair. There is far too much food and nobody at this table is asking you anything.

What the verse actually tells people to do

There is a line in Jeremiah about old paths that gets used badly in both directions, and what it actually says is more careful than either use.

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

Read the sequence. Stand. See. Ask. And the thing to ask is not simply where is the old path. It is: ask for the old paths, where is the good way.

That is a filter sitting inside the sentence. Not every old path is the good way, and the verse assumes somebody standing at a junction who has to look and ask rather than simply reverse.

And then walk therein. One path, chosen, after looking. Not the whole road back.

You are being told to stand and look and ask rather than either to return or to keep going. Jeremiah 6:16 puts see and ask between standing and walking and includes the phrase where is the good way as a filter, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept all four verbs in one sentence, which means recovering one thing from an old road has never been the same act as going back down it.

A rhythm is not the thing you left

Now let us be exact, because everything turns on this and it is the reason the sentence has felt impossible to say.

You left a set of things. Some of them were the reasons, and they were real.

The hour was not one of them. The hour was a rhythm that happened to live inside a house you had to leave, and it came off with everything else because that is how leaving works. Nobody separates a house into components on their way out of it.

You are able to keep a rhythm without keeping what surrounded it, and the two were never the same object. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 says prove all things, hold fast that which is good, and it assumes somebody sorting through a mixed inheritance rather than accepting or rejecting the whole of it, and it is the same Spirit who leads into all truth, which means the sorting you have never let yourself do is exactly the work that verse describes.

What it would sound like, and what it would actually be

Here is the fear, said plainly.

If you take one hour back, somebody will read it as the beginning of a return.

That may happen. One person at that table may misread it, and there is nothing you can do about that, and it is not a reason to go without something for the rest of your life.

You are permitted to be misread, and no verse anywhere makes a person's practice depend on how it will be interpreted. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, and it is written to people whose practices were being read wrongly by each other in both directions, and it is the same Spirit who leads each believer, which means what you set up on your own ground is between you and Him.

Nobody here is telling you what to take back, or how much, or whether. That is entirely yours.