There Were Years I Did Not Wear Any

There was a stretch, and you could not put a date on either end of it.

You went to the shop. You picked children up. You went to somebody's house on a Saturday. And nothing at all happened before you went, because there was nothing to happen. You put your shoes on and you left.

I am not going to tell you that was better. That is exactly the kind of thing people say and it is not true and it would be a rule wearing a nostalgia coat.

What I want to notice is something quieter, and it is not about what was on your face in either stretch.

It is that one of those stretches had no decision in it.

Nothing was decided in 1996. That is the whole of the difference. Now there is a decision, every single time, and the decision has an answer, and the answer is always the same, and a thing that always has the same answer has stopped being a decision and become a requirement.

Where the requirement came from

Let me be careful here, because there are two entirely different things that look the same from outside.

One woman does something because she likes it. She enjoys it, it is hers, it is a pleasure, and if she skipped it one day nothing at all would follow.

Another woman does the same thing because a day cannot begin without it. It is not a pleasure, it is a threshold, and skipping it would mean not going out.

You are allowed to have a threshold, and needing one has never once been a fault in anybody who has to leave a house. Jeremiah 6 says ye shall find rest for your souls, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a woman at her own doorway rather than at a standard.

From the doorstep those two look identical. From the inside they could not be less alike.

You are somewhere on that line and it has never once been examined, and no single morning has ever been asked which of the two it was. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman which of two identical looking things she is doing, and Jeremiah 6 has an instruction about standing still and asking a question.

And here is the thing that makes it hard to see.

The requirement arrived one reasonable decision at a time.

There was a day you had a reason. And another day. And a stretch where something was going on and it helped. And none of those was a mistake, and not one of them was the day it changed, and by the time it had become a requirement there was no moment anybody could point at.

That is how every requirement of this kind arrives, and it is why nobody can ever answer the question of when.

You are inside something that arrived by accumulation, and there has never once been a day that anybody could name as the day it began. Scripture in Jeremiah 6 says stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops a woman on a road long enough to look.

Ask for the old paths

There is an instruction in Jeremiah with four movements in it and every one is worth having.

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. See. Ask. Walk.

The first one is the one nobody does. Stand ye in the ways. Stop moving, in the middle of the road, which is the only position from which anything can be looked at properly.

A road cannot be examined while somebody is traveling it at speed. Everything in this article requires standing still for about a minute, and standing still is not something a woman with a full day is ever encouraged to do.

You are asked to stand before anything else, and no road anywhere has ever once been examinable at speed. It is written in Jeremiah 6 that we stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stops a woman in the middle of an ordinary week.

And then the second thing, which is what protects this from being nostalgia.

Ask for the old paths, where is the good way.

Not: go back. Not: the old one was better. Ask where the good way is, and the asking is genuine, because the verse does not assume the answer.

Old is not the qualification. Good is. And the reason the old paths get mentioned is that a good way that has been walked before is easier to find than one nobody has ever used.

You are asked to look for a good way rather than an old one, and Scripture has never once said that a thing was better because it came first. The Spirit of God is what keeps a woman from swapping one requirement for another, and the written word says ask for the old paths, where is the good way.

One errand, the old way

So here is the assignment, and it is one errand.

Go out on one errand this week the way you would have gone out in 1996.

One errand. The shop, the post, dropping something off. Something with a purpose that takes twenty minutes.

Not a day out. Not a social thing. Not an event where you would be looked at, because that is a much bigger ask and it is not what this is for.

You are being asked for something small rather than something brave, and this has never once been about walking into a room to be looked at. Jeremiah 6 says ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and the Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary errand into a place to stand.

Put your shoes on and go.

Here is what the twenty minutes actually gives you, and it is not what you expect. It is not about being seen. It is about finding out what a threshold costs, and the only way to find that out is to cross it once without paying.

And here is what most women report. Nothing happens. Nobody looks. The errand takes the length of an errand and then it is over, and the whole thing turns out to have been about the doorway and not about the shop at all.

You are able to cross a threshold once without paying it, and the crossing has never once been tested in twenty years. The written word in Jeremiah 6 asks a person to stand and look for the good way, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one ordinary errand into care rather than into a demonstration.