Who Despised the Day

There are nine chairs out and seven people in them, and he counts, and he hates that he counts.

It is Wednesday. It is the small hall behind the main building, the one with the serving hatch and the heater that clanks twice before it decides to work. Somebody has brought a tin of cookies and set it beside the urn, and somebody else has already eaten four of them and made a joke about it.

He is fifty three. When he was nineteen a man he admired put a hand on his head at a summer meeting and used words like nations, and thousands, and God has something big for you, and the whole room said amen. He has carried that sentence in his coat pocket for thirty four years, and he takes it out more often than he admits.

Tonight there are seven people. The heater clanks. A woman on the second row asks them to pray for her daughter and gets halfway through the sentence before she cannot finish it, and the man beside her puts a hand on her back and leaves it there. A newer man reads a verse out loud, badly, then reads it again better, and looks quietly pleased with himself. They sing twice with nothing to accompany them, and it is not good singing, and for about eight seconds in the middle of the second one it is genuinely beautiful.

And underneath all of it, all evening, he is doing the sum. Seven. Thirty four years and seven. And the sum comes with a conclusion attached that he has never once said out loud, and the conclusion is: so this is what it came to.

He stacks the chairs afterward. He is good at it. He can do nine in about forty seconds, and he knows that about himself, and even that feels like part of the joke. Then he turns off the lights and stands a moment in the doorway of a dark room where somebody was genuinely comforted an hour ago, and what he feels for that room is closer to contempt than anything else, and he would be ashamed to have it read aloud.

Maybe you know that hall. Or maybe your small day has nothing to do with a hall. Maybe it is one room with one person in it who needs you, and the same four walls, and a Tuesday that is identical to last Tuesday. Maybe somebody said something over you once, at nineteen or at nine, and you have been measuring every year since against a word you did not choose and cannot make happen.

The question is not about the day

I want to say the true thing first, because there is a version of this page that would tell you seven is enough really, and that version is a pat on the arm and it feeds nobody.

Nobody is going to tell you that the word over you at nineteen was a mistake. I do not know what God is doing with it and neither do you, and a page that shrinks His promise in order to make you feel better about Wednesday has stolen from you to comfort you. That is not what is happening here.

But look at what is actually being despised in that doorway. Not the promise. The room. The seven people, the clanking heater, the eight beautiful seconds, the hand on a crying woman's back. That is what got weighed and found wanting, and it was weighed on an instrument nobody in heaven is holding.

Here is God asking about exactly this, in a book about a building project that came out much smaller than the one people remembered.

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

It is a question, and it is not a gentle one, and it is not aimed at the day. It is aimed at the despising. The old men who had seen the first house wept when they saw the foundations of the second, because the second was so much less, and God turns and asks the room who exactly has decided that a small beginning is contemptible.

You are standing in a day that God has never once despised, and the sum you have been running was never His arithmetic. Zechariah 4:10 puts the eyes of the Lord on the small thing and asks who dared look down on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that written question out of a building site in Jerusalem and asks it in a dark hall with the chairs already stacked.

And notice what the verse says those eyes are doing. Running to and fro through the whole earth. The whole earth, and they stop here. There is nothing in the sentence about them being on their way to something bigger.

You have the attention of the God whose eyes cross the whole earth, and they are resting on a room with seven people in it. It is written that they run to and fro through the whole earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line about the eyes of the Lord mean the actual room you were about to switch the lights off in.

He is not grading the size

Now the second thing, and it matters more than the first.

Some small lives are not chosen. Some are small because a body will not do what it used to, or because somebody at home needs you and that is simply the shape of this year, or because of a circumstance no one would pick out of a catalog. I am not going to call that a gift, and I am not going to ask you to make peace with it, and nothing on this page suggests you step back from what you are carrying. What I will say is that God is not grading the size of your day. He never was. The eyes that run to and fro over the whole earth stop over a room like that and they stay there.

And here is what He is doing while He looks.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Rejoice over you. Rest in His love over you. Sing over you. Not over the version of your life that fulfills the word from the summer meeting. Over you, in the middle of you, in the hall, on the Wednesday, with the cookie tin and the heater and the seven.

You are being sung over tonight by the God who is in the middle of this room, and the singing did not wait for the numbers to improve. Zephaniah 3:17 says He rejoices over you with joy and joys over you with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a written song into a dark hall and does not turn the lights back on to do it.

I want to be plain about the promise, because you are still holding it and you should. What was said over you at nineteen belongs to God, and He has not forgotten it, and I am not going to put a date on it or tell you what it will turn out to have meant. That is His. What I can tell you is what today is, and today is not a waiting room. The eyes were here. The singing was here. The eight beautiful seconds were real and He was in them.

You were never asked to hold up a small day against a big word, and the day you actually lived tonight was seen from the first minute of it. It is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes being seen feel like being fed rather than being inspected.