Older Than The County

The wall map got him. Not a sermon, not a book. A wall map in a doctor's office in March.

He was waiting on his mother, and there was a map of the world up behind the desk, the kind with the countries in different colors, and he was looking at it the way you look at anything when you have been sitting for forty minutes.

And he found the place. He had heard the name of it his whole life. It is in every story he was ever told in that little building on Ridge Road, and he had never once in fifty eight years looked at where it actually is.

It is a long way off.

He sat there and worked out that the entire faith he was raised in, every hymn, every funeral, every dinner on the ground, every August week of meetings with the windows open, all of it, came from a place that is most of the way around a map from the county he was born in.

And he did not feel proud of it. That is what he could not explain to his wife in the truck afterward. He felt unsteady, like a man finding out his house is on somebody else's land.

Because here is what he had believed without ever putting it in words: this belonged to them. To his grandfather and the men who built that building and the county and the road and the four families who kept it going through the seventies. It was theirs. That was the whole comfort of it.

And now it turns out it walked in from three thousand miles away and it was old when it got here.

You know that feeling if you have it, and you might never have named it.

Maybe your faith is a county. Maybe it is a valley, or a parish, or one street in a city, or a language, or a grandmother's kitchen. Maybe everything you know about God has a postcode on it and you never noticed the postcode until something made you look at a map.

Nobody put it on you deliberately. It is just what happens when a good thing is handed down well in one place for a long time.

The old road was never a local road

There is a line in Jeremiah that men have carved over doorways, and it is not about a place. It is about a road.

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

Stand in the ways and ask for the old paths. That is a man being told to look for a road that was already there.

Not to build one. Not to invent a way of doing it that suits his county. To find the one that has been under everybody's feet the whole time, and get on it, and walk.

You are on an old road, and it was laid down long before anybody in your family walked a step of it. That is what the verse means by the old paths, which are old precisely because somebody else wore them in first (Jeremiah 6:16), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who has kept that road open through every century since, which is not a thing four families in a county could ever have done by themselves.

Now here is the thing that took the unsteadiness out of it for him, and it took about a week.

A road being long does not make a stretch of it less yours. A man does not stop owning the mile he walks because the road continues past the ridge.

Nothing here is a word against your county

Let me be plain, in case a page like this starts to sound like one, because it will not.

The little building on Ridge Road is not a lesser version of anything. What those four families kept going through the seventies is the real thing, and the hymns are the real thing, and your grandmother's kitchen is the real thing, and nothing on this site is ever going to hand you the idea that where you were raised was a copy of somewhere better.

That would be an argument, and worse, it would be a theft. You would put this page down owning less than you picked it up with.

You have not been standing in a small version of this, and there is no bigger room that you were left out of. Scripture says the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him (Romans 10:12), and it is His Spirit, the same one, in a county building on a Wednesday night and everywhere else, and He does not come in a stronger measure to bigger rooms.

Where the road actually starts

Now let us walk back up it, because there is something worth seeing at the far end.

The road does not start at the little building. It does not start with your grandfather, or with the preacher who came through in the fifties, or with the country your family sailed from before that.

It starts with a people, in one country, a long way east, who had been walking with God for centuries before anything else on this map existed. Every hymn you know is downstream of their songs. The book those men read out from the front on a Sunday is more than half theirs, written in their language, about their family, in their towns.

That is not somebody else's history you are borrowing. It is the upper end of your own road.

You are the far end of something ancient, and the county is a stretch of it rather than the whole of it. The word says thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18), and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that sentence to a man in a truck in March without letting it turn into a reason to think less of his own people.