The Street I Do Not Walk Down

There is a route he takes now, and it adds eleven minutes.

Up past the school, left at the water tank, along the back of the gardens where the dogs are, and out onto the main road two hundred yards past the corner. Everybody assumes he likes the walk.

The shop was on that street for eleven years. His father's before that, though his father sold hardware and he had turned it into something else, and for a while it worked, and then a season came where nothing came in at all and then it was over.

There was no scandal. He paid what he could pay. Two people on that street will still tell you he was the most honest man in the trade.

He has not walked past the door since the day he took the key back.

His son asked him last summer why they always go the long way, and he said something about the traffic, and his son let it go because he is a kind boy who could tell.

Eleven minutes, twice a day, for two years. He has worked out the total once and did not do it again.

If there is a street you go around, you know exactly what I mean. And nothing on this page is going to explain to you why the shop closed.

Not a classroom, a valley

Let me say first what I am not going to do, because you have probably had two years of people who did it anyway.

I am not going to tell you what that season was for. I do not know. I was not there and no page is. If somebody has explained to you that God closed that shop to teach you something, I would like you to set that down for the next ten minutes; they may have loved you, and they did not know either.

What can be said is not a reason. It is a location, and it is the most famous location in the whole book.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Read the small word that does all the work. Through. It is not a room you are put in. It is ground you are walking on, and the psalm has the shepherd walking on it too.

You are walking through something rather than being held in it, and He is on that street with you. That is not my comfort. It is written in Psalm 23:4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

Notice what David does not say. He does not say the valley is a lesson. He does not say it was arranged. He says one thing about it, which is that he is not alone in it, and that is the entire content of the comfort in that verse.

So the eleven minutes have not been weakness. You have had Him beside you on every one of those long ways round, and the walking was never done on your own. The word settled that before your father ever opened that door, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on the road while you read this.

What the long way costs a man

Here is what avoidance actually does, and it is worth being exact, because from inside it feels like sense.

A street you do not walk down does not stay a street. It becomes a place with a verdict attached, and the verdict grows, quietly, every time you go the long way. Two years of going round it has made it larger than it was on the day the key went back.

And the avoidance has spread. You go the long way past your own past, which means you also do not walk past the man who ran the fruit stall and still asks after you, or the woman who brought her father in every Thursday for eleven years, or the door of a shop that had, for a while, your name over it and was good.

You are not protecting yourself from the failure. You are also fenced out of the eleven years.

You have permission to walk down your own street, and the permission does not require the season to have made sense first. Psalm 23 says the shepherd is with him in the valley; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to go past a door he has been avoiding and keep breathing.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the road you are on. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number. That is not weakness. It is the same instinct that makes a man shout when a roof comes down.