The Day of Small Things

The shutter goes up at ten to nine the way it always does, with the same shove halfway where the runner has always caught.

He puts the kettle on in the back. He turns the sign. He sits down at the bench and pulls the lamp over, and the tools are exactly where he left them on Friday, because they are always exactly where he left them: the tweezers in the groove, the loupe by his right hand, the little brass tray with the screws in it that are too small to see and too expensive to lose.

Something happened yesterday. That is the thing sitting behind all of this. Not a scene, and nothing anybody watched. On the way back from the wholesaler he said something to God out loud in the van, a plain sentence, the first one in longer than he could say, and he meant every word of it, and it was real.

He is fairly sure it was real. He was sure last night.

Because this morning the runner still catches halfway. The kettle still takes four minutes. There is a movement on the bench with a broken staff in it that was broken on Friday and is still broken now. He does not feel different. He checks, quietly, the way a man checks a tooth with his tongue, and there is nothing there. No lift, no warmth, no sense of a door having opened.

He puts the loupe in and picks up the tweezers and starts, because a bench does not care how yesterday went.

And underneath the work the question runs on a loop, and it is not a dramatic question. It is only this: if it was real, why does this morning look exactly like every other morning I have ever had.

You know that morning. You meant it, and you would say so, and now you are standing in a day that has not been informed.

Yesterday was real, and it did not come with weather

Two things are true at once this morning, and the whole difficulty is that they feel as though they cannot both be.

The first is that something happened yesterday. The second is that today looks exactly like last week. Those do not fight. We have been trained to think that a real thing announces itself in the following twenty four hours, and that a quiet Monday is a receipt marked void, and neither of those has ever been how God has worked with anybody.

Think of what actually happens in the room at the end of the story. The son gets a robe and a ring and a meal, and then Luke stops writing, and the next morning is not recorded. There is a next morning. There always is. Somebody put the plates away, and the son woke up in a familiar house with the same face in the same mirror, and nothing in the text suggests the robe stopped being his while he was asleep.

You are home this morning, and the ordinariness of the room has no authority to reverse that. That is not me being kind about your Monday. It is written all through Scripture that God settles a thing and then leaves people to live in ordinary weather afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a settled thing settled while a man is at a bench with a loupe in his eye and no feeling in him at all.

Who has ever despised the day of small things

Now the verse, and it is one of my favorites in the prophets, because of who is being defended in it.

The people had come back and laid a foundation for the second temple, and it was small. Genuinely small. The old men who could remember the first house looked at it and wept, and the sound of the weeping got mixed in with the sound of the shouting so that nobody outside could tell which was which. And in the middle of all that, God asks a question.

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

Read who is asking. This is not a friend of the builders offering encouragement. This is God, out loud, defending a day that looked like nothing to everybody standing on it. The question has an edge in it, and the edge is not turned toward the small day. It is turned toward the despising.

And look at the picture He gives to replace it. A plummet in a man's hand. A plumb line. The most ordinary tool on any building site in the ancient world, a weight on a string, held by a man on a working morning, and that is God's own image of the thing worth rejoicing over. Not the finished house. Not a moment of glory. A tool, in a hand, on a day that felt like nothing.

You have a settled thing in your hands this morning, and the smallness of the morning is not a mark against it. I am not laying my own encouragement over your bench. Zechariah 4:10 is written down, and it is God Himself who asked the question in defense of a day exactly like the one you are standing in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a question asked over a building site and asks it again in a repair shop.

An ordinary morning is where a real thing goes to live

Here is what I would want said to me at this bench, so I will say it to you plainly.

A return does not need the following morning to co-sign it. If it did, then everything would depend on your capacity to produce a feeling on demand, which is a burden nobody in Scripture is ever handed and one I have no intention of handing you. What was real yesterday was real because of who received it, not because of what you can detect in yourself at ten to nine.

And there is a mercy hidden in the flatness, though it takes a while to see it. A morning with nothing in it is a morning that cannot be faked. Nobody is performing. Nobody is riding a feeling. Whatever is standing this morning is standing on its own, and that is a far sturdier thing than a week of good weather.

The psalm says the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord (Psalm 37:23). Steps. Not leaps, not seasons, not transformations with a date on them. The unit God works in is the step, and a step is by definition a small thing, and He has never once been embarrassed by the size of the unit.

You have the whole of an ordinary week to live in as somebody who is already home, and nothing in it has to prove anything. I do not carry authority to tell you what the coming weeks will feel like and I will not invent one; that is His and He does it at His own pace. What is written down is that God defended a small day out loud, Zechariah 4:10 is where it stands, and it is His Spirit and not the temperature of a morning who keeps a person in what is already theirs.