The Same Boring Route Every Time

Left at the end, down to the corner, round by the shops, back the other way.

You could do it asleep. You more or less do. And somebody said it out loud last week, that it is always the same walk, and everybody agreed, and since then it has been slightly harder to suggest.

So now there is a new problem on top of the old one. Not only do you have to get out of the door, you apparently have to get out of the door to somewhere interesting, and that requires planning and probably a car, and so the walk that used to be difficult has become impossible.

I want to take that off you straight away.

The route is not the problem. Attention is the problem, and those are different things and only one of them is expensive.

Here is a test. Without going outside, describe the front door of the fourth house on your left. What color is it. Is there anything growing by it. Is there a step.

You have walked past that door perhaps four hundred times. And I suspect you cannot describe it, and that is not a failing, it is just what a brain does with a route it has decided is known: it stops sending the pictures.

You are not bored of that street. You have stopped seeing it, which is a completely different condition and has a completely different remedy.

Open his eyes, that he may see

There is a moment where a frightened young man is standing on a hillside and the thing that changes is not the hillside.

And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. (2 Kings 6:17, King James Version)

Open his eyes, that he may see.

Nothing arrives. That is the part people skip past. No horses ride in. Nothing is added to that mountain in that verse. Everything the young man eventually sees was already there while he was standing in the middle of it seeing nothing.

The prayer is not for reinforcements. The prayer is for eyes.

And notice who prays it. Elisha does not tell the young man to look harder or to have a better attitude about the mountain. He asks God to do something to the man's seeing, which means seeing is treated there as something that can be given rather than something you simply must manage.

I am not going to pretend your street corner is a mountain full of chariots. It is a street corner. But the mechanism named in that verse is the exact one you need: the situation does not have to change for what is in it to become visible.

You are able to be given eyes for the place you already are, and it has never once required anything new to arrive first. Second Kings 6:17 changes the man rather than the mountain, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes seeing a gift rather than an effort.

Attention is a thing children are good at

Here is the practical part, and it involves handing the job to somebody better at it than you.

Children are much better at this than adults, and they have not lost it yet. A four year old can spend nine minutes on a wall. What looks like dawdling is a person with their attention still working properly, and the walk gets faster and duller every year that you train it out of them.

So do not be the one who spots things. Ask them to.

Three things nobody has noticed before. That is the whole game, it does not need explaining twice, and it converts the boring route into a search, and a search is a completely different experience of the same pavement.

And what gets found is never scenic. It is a strange bracket on a wall. A gate that does not match its fence. A name carved into a step. Somebody's odd choice of curtain. A cat that is apparently always there. That is the correct kind of thing and it is much better than anything scenic would be.

You are able to make the same street into a search, and it has never once needed a better route to become worth walking. The written word changes the seeing rather than the surroundings, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives attention back to a family who wore it out.

Three things on the usual route

So here is the assignment.

Walk the usual route and find three things you have never noticed.

The usual one. Deliberately the usual one, and not a new route, because the whole point is to prove that this one is not used up.

Say it before you leave: we are looking for three things nobody has ever noticed. Then let them find them. Do not correct what counts. If a child says a puddle, the puddle counts.

And when somebody finds something, stop. That is the part adults get wrong. Stopping for eleven seconds is the difference between noticing something and walking past a thing you have named.

Second Kings 6:17 has the eyes opened rather than the mountain restocked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a family stops on a pavement to look at a bracket.

You are able to find three new things on a route you have walked four hundred times, and they have never once needed to be beautiful to be found. Second Kings 6:17 shows everything already present before anybody could see it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out there with a family on their own street.