Who Despised The Day Of Small Things

By four in the afternoon he has crossed one thing off a list of six.

The list is on the back of an envelope. Call the pharmacy. The dishes. The letter. The porch step. Ask after Danny. And one more word that has been copied onto every list for a month and which he no longer actually reads. The crossed-off one is the dishes. It took the middle of the day and two sits down.

He is fifty-eight. There was a stretch of about twenty years when a day like this one would have been finished by nine in the morning and he would have done three other people's days on top of it before lunch. He knows precisely what he used to be able to do, down to the hour, and that is exactly the trouble. He owns a very accurate ruler and he lays it against every single afternoon.

He puts the pen down without looking at the envelope again and says it out loud, mildly, in the tone another man would use for a tire pressure. "If I dropped off the earth tomorrow, nobody would be short of anything."

You have not said that one out loud, because it comes out sounding like fishing and it is not fishing. It is a conclusion, and you reached it carefully. The people who love you would be sad, genuinely, and for a good while. And then nothing in the actual running of anything would change, because nothing in the actual running of anything currently rests on you. You are not being morbid about it. You are being accurate. And somewhere in the last few years, being accurate about it quietly took you out of the count.

Notice who is asking

There is one sentence in Zechariah written for a whole generation of men holding exactly your ruler, and almost everybody reads it in the wrong voice.

The setting is the second temple, going up on the footprint of the first. When the foundation was laid, the old men who had seen the original building wept out loud, and the young men shouted for joy, and the noise was so mixed that nobody outside could tell which was which. The weeping was not sentiment. Those men had a measurement, and they laid it against the new work, and the new work came up short.

Then God asks this:

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.Zechariah 4:10

Read the tone before you read the content. That is not a gentle greeting card question and it is not a rebuke aimed at discouraged people. It has an edge on it. It is the tone of a man who walks into a room and asks, quietly, who has been saying that about his son.

Whoever it is that despises the day of small things, God is asking after them, and He is not asking on their side.

You are not being scolded by that question, you are being defended by it, and the question is asked in God's own voice. Zechariah 4:10 puts it in the mouth of the Lord rather than in the mouth of some encourager, and the Spirit is what has been holding it open over your afternoon.

Then look at what the verse says God's eyes are actually resting on. Not the elevation of the building. Not the day's total. A plummet. A plumb bob, a weight on a string, the least impressive object on that entire site, held in one man's hand while everything around him is noise and dust.

You have been standing in front of those eyes all afternoon, and they were never running to and fro through the earth looking for output. The eyes in that verse are written down as the eyes of the Lord, going through the whole earth, and the Holy Spirit has not once been out surveying anybody's productivity.

The measurement is not the one you are holding

Your ruler is accurate. I want to grant you that completely, because half of what gets said to men in your position is a suggestion that they are exaggerating, and you are not. You could do more at thirty-eight. That is a true sentence and no amount of warmth from me makes it untrue.

The ruler is accurate and it is the wrong instrument. It measures capacity, and capacity is not what a part in a people is measured in. Nowhere, in any book of this, is a person's place among God's people sized by what they can get through in a day.

Paul goes further than that and says something almost rude about it. Writing about the body, he says the members which seem to be more feeble are necessary. Not tolerated. Not carried. Not welcome anyway, bless them. Necessary, which is a word about load bearing, and he applies it to the feeble ones specifically and on purpose.

You have a part in this that the rest of them need, and it is not decorative and it was never on probation. 1 Corinthians 12:22 uses the word necessary and uses it about the feeble members by name, and the same Spirit who wrote that through Paul is the one who set you where you are.

Now, I am not going to tell you what your part is. That is not mine to allocate, and I would be lying if I pretended to know, and a man handed a job by a stranger has been given a task and not a place. Nobody here is putting you on a list or asking you to sign up for anything. If you have nothing at all in you today, and some days there is nothing at all, that is not a shortfall against a standard anybody set.

What I am telling you is the fact underneath the naming: that there is one, and that it is not a courtesy.

You are needed among God's people at your present strength, and no version of you from twenty years ago is the one they are missing. God had a question written down through a prophet where a rebuke would have been easier, and His Spirit does not grade a day by the size of it.