The Day Of Small Things

Four hundred and something. She stopped counting in the spring.

That is roughly how many times she has done the same small careful thing this year. It takes between nine and fourteen minutes. It has to be right. If it is not right somebody notices six weeks later, in another town, and never knows her name.

She is good at it. Genuinely good, in the way that only shows up in the ones that do not come back.

And the thing she said to me, quietly, with the lamp on, was that she cannot find God anywhere in it.

She has looked. She has tried praying while she does it and her mind goes to the work, because the work needs her mind. She has tried thinking of it as an offering and it feels like a phrase somebody else came up with. She has tried listening to good things while she works and mostly she just does the thing.

And so a slow conclusion has settled in her, and it is not dramatic and it is not a crisis. It is simply this: whatever God is doing in the world, He is doing it somewhere with more going on.

Four hundred and something of the same nine minutes. It is not that she resents it. She likes it. She just cannot make it mean anything, and she has stopped trying, and the stopping has cost her something she cannot name.

You may know that lamp. Something small and repeated and done well, and no way you have ever found to connect it to God, and a quiet settled sense that the interesting part of His attention is elsewhere.

Somebody despised the day of small things

There is a line in a short book near the end of the Old Testament, and it arrives in the middle of a rebuilding job that everybody thought was pitiful.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel.Zechariah 4:10

The picture at the end is a builder's line with a weight on it, hanging straight, checking that a wall is true. That is what they will rejoice to see. Not the finished temple. A man holding a plumb line, doing the small correct thing, on a site everybody had written off as too small to matter.

And the question at the front is a rebuke, and it is worth hearing who it is aimed at. Who has despised the day of small things? Not God. God is the One asking.

You are working inside a day God has never once despised, and it has been that kind of day for four hundred repetitions. Zechariah 4:10 has the plumb line in a man's hand as the thing worth rejoicing over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a building site and puts it on a folding table with a lamp on it.

I want to say something about repetition, because it gets treated as the enemy of meaning and it is not.

The same nine minutes done four hundred times is not four hundred failures to do something more interesting. It is one thing, done four hundred times, correctly, by somebody who could have let three of them slide and did not. Nobody sees that. It shows up only in the absence of a problem in another town.

That is very close to how most of what God does actually looks.

You are not outside His attention because there is not much happening where you are. The written word makes a plumb line in one man's hand the thing heaven rejoices to see, and the Holy Spirit is not drawn to scale, He is drawn to what is true.

Here is the honest half. Making it mean something is not a technique you have been failing at. You have tried praying through it and your mind went to the work, and that is not a spiritual failure, that is what happens when work needs your mind. The connection was never going to come from concentrating harder while you do it.

It comes from one sentence said before or after, over the thing, naming it as it actually is. Not dressed up. The same small careful thing, offered exactly at its own size.