All Of It Is Small

He wrote the week down on the back of a feed bill, which is not something he has ever done before and which he would not tell anybody about.

Monday: the fence at the top corner, four posts.

Tuesday: took Ray to the clinic and waited three hours and brought him back.

Wednesday: nothing.

Thursday: rang Marion because her sister died in March and Thursdays are bad, and put the bins out for the empty house.

Friday: the fence again, six more posts, and half an hour on the phone with his nephew who has a problem he is not ready to name.

He looked at the list and thought: none of that is anything.

Not bitterly. He is not a man who feels sorry for himself and he would be embarrassed by the suggestion. It was an apartment conclusion about an apartment week, and he has been reaching it, in one form or another, most weeks for about forty years.

All of it is small. That is the verdict, and it has never once been contested by anybody, because he has never once said it out loud.

If you look at your week and see nothing, you know exactly what I mean.

Who is doing the despising

Let me put the verse in front of you first and then say the plain thing about it.

There was a rebuilding going on and it was not impressive. The foundation was small and the people who remembered the first temple wept when they saw it, because it was nothing next to what had been.

And this is what came back.

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

It is a question, and it is asked as though the answer is obvious and nobody should have needed telling.

The plummet is a plumb line: the string with a weight on it that tells you whether a wall is true. It is the most ordinary tool on any site and it is in the hand of the man doing the work, and heaven is looking at it and rejoicing.

You have a week of small true things, and heaven has never once been unimpressed by a plumb line. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Zechariah 4:10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

Now the plain thing. Who has been despising the day of small things at your kitchen table?

Not God. He asked that question in a tone that says nobody sensible does.

So the verdict has not been humility. You have four posts and three hours in a clinic and a phone call on a Thursday, and none of it needs to be bigger to count. The word settled that before you started farming, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the kitchen while you read this.

Small is not the same as little

Here is worth separating, because you have had them joined for forty years.

Small describes a size. Little, in the way you have been using it, is a judgment about worth, and there is nothing in Scripture that puts an equals sign between them.

Look at your own list and try it. Ray got to the clinic. There is no version of that Tuesday where Ray gets to the clinic if you are not in it, and no smaller version of the fact.

Marion had a phone call on a Thursday in the year her sister died. Your nephew talked for half an hour and did not name the thing and will probably ring again, and the reason he will call again is Friday.

None of those is small in the sense of being partial. They are complete. They are just not large, and largeness was never the measure anybody applied except you.

You have permission to stop grading your own week, and the permission was given rather than earned by having a better one. Zechariah 4 has heaven rejoicing over a builder's plumb line; His Spirit is the one who lets a man look at an ordinary week without a verdict on the end of it.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the kitchen you are in. If part of the reason nothing you do ever counts is that somebody near you makes sure it does not, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.