I Have Kept One Small Thing For Forty Years

You have gone to that corner and back most evenings for forty years.

You do not think of it as anything. If somebody asked you what you do for exercise you would say nothing, and mean it, because in your head this is not exercise, it is just what happens after the dishes.

And here is what nobody in your family has understood, including you.

You are the only person any of them knows who has kept something for forty years.

Your daughter has not. She has started nine things. Your grandson is twenty two and has an app and a plan and a great deal of enthusiasm and has never held anything past March.

And they all assume that what you have is a personality. Grandma is just like that. She has always done it.

It is not a personality. There is a method in it, and you have never articulated it, and it is going to die with you unless somebody asks you the right question.

So let me ask it, and then let me tell you what to do with the answer.

How has this lasted forty years, and what would you say if somebody genuinely wanted to know?

Ask for the old paths

There is an instruction in Jeremiah about looking backward for a method, and it is not nostalgic.

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, King James Version)

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.

Ask for the old paths. Not admire them. Not remember them fondly. Ask, which means there is somebody to ask, and it means the asking is a live and practical act.

You have a verse that treats an old way as something to be asked after rather than commemorated, and Jeremiah 6:16 has never once been about looking back with affection. The instruction is to ask and then to walk in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a method from one generation to another.

You are able to see the sequence in that verse and it is worth noticing how practical it is.

Stand. See. Ask. Walk. Four verbs, and the third one requires another person, and the fourth one is what the asking was for.

Nobody in that sentence is nostalgic. Somebody is looking for a road that works, and the way you find it is by asking somebody who knows where it goes.

And there is one more thing in there that is worth your attention. The result is not achievement, and it is not results. It is rest for your souls, which is a strange promise to attach to a path, and it is exactly what a thing you have done for forty years produces in a person.

You are able to be the one somebody asks, and having never articulated the method has never once meant you do not have one. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a good way and passes it on, and Jeremiah 6:16 makes the asking a live act rather than a fond one.

You do have a method

Here is what I suspect your method is, and you can correct it, and the correcting is the point.

It is small enough that a bad day cannot stop it. It is attached to something else so nobody has to remember it. And you have never once treated a missed evening as meaning anything.

You have three rules you have never said out loud, and forty years of using them has never once required you to be able to name them. It is written stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person's own knowledge up where they can see it.

That is the whole thing, and it has kept a practice alive through four decades that included a bereavement, two moves and a period where you were not well.

And your grandson has none of the three. His thing is large enough that a bad day ends it, free standing so that it has to be remembered, and carries so much meaning that a missed day is a failure.

He has enthusiasm and an app and no method, and you have a method and no enthusiasm at all, and you have never once compared notes.

You are able to hand somebody something that would take them years to find, and doing it in one conversation has never once made it a small gift. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a good way down a family line, and Jeremiah 6:16 has the asking come before the walking.

Take one of them and tell them how

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves and the second is the reason this article exists.

Do your small thing this week with one of them beside you, and tell them plainly how it has lasted.

You are able to say the method out loud, and never having put it into words has never once meant you could not. It is written and walk therein, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a familiar corner with two people forty years apart.

The first half is easy. Ask your grandson to come to the corner with you. He will come, because they always come when you ask, which is one of the privileges of being seventy nine.

The second half is the one you will avoid.

On the way there, tell him. Not as advice, which he will resist, and not as a story about the past, which he will enjoy and file away.

As a method. Say it in plain sentences: I never made it big. I do it after the dishes so I never have to remember it. And when I miss one, I have never once made anything of it.

You have three sentences that are the whole inheritance, and forty seconds has never once been too short a time to hand something over in. Jeremiah 6:16 sends a person to ask for the old paths and then to walk in them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain answer land in somebody of twenty two.

You have something worth handing over, and the ordinariness of it has never once made it less than what he is looking for. Jeremiah 6:16 has somebody asking for a path and somebody else knowing where it is, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the answering.

And do not soften it by saying it probably would not work for him. Say it as what it is, which is the thing that worked for forty years.