I Am Waiting Until It Is Worth Doing

Somebody suggests twenty minutes and something in you goes: what is the point of that.

Not out loud. You would never say it out loud, because it sounds like exactly what it is. But it is there, and it is the reason you have taken your family precisely nowhere in about fourteen months.

Because in your head there is a proper version. A real one. A whole afternoon somewhere with time to get into it, the kind of thing that would actually be worth the effort of organizing everybody.

And that version requires a free Saturday and decent weather and everyone in a reasonable mood, and those three things have not lined up since last spring, and so the answer has been nothing. Not the smaller version. Nothing.

I want to say something to you carefully, because I think you already suspect it and have not let yourself finish the thought.

The standard has not been protecting the quality of your family life. It has been protecting you from starting.

Who is doing the despising

There is a question in Zechariah that is not rhetorical, and it has an accusation folded inside it.

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, King James Version)

Who has despised the day of small things.

That is a real question with a real answer, and it is being asked in the middle of a building project that had shrunk to almost nothing. The men doing it could see how small it was. They were comparing it against a temple that had been magnificent and was now a memory, and the comparison was killing them.

And God does not tell them the small thing will become big. He asks who has been holding it in contempt.

You are not looking at a small day that needs to grow, and you were never asked to make it worth something before it counted. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despised the small day rather than promising the small day will become large, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that question land on a man who has been holding twenty minutes in contempt for a year.

And then look at what is in the hand. A plummet. A plumb line. The smallest possible builder's tool, the one that tells you whether one course of stone is straight.

That is what the eyes of the Lord are said to be running through the whole earth to look at. Not the finished thing. A line on a single course.

You have the whole attention of God on a thing this small, and it was never the size of the work that drew it there. The written word puts the eyes of the Lord on a plumb line in a hand, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary Tuesday worth something without inflating it.

The proper version is not coming

Now the part you already know, said plainly.

The free Saturday with good weather and everybody willing has arrived twice in two years. You can count it, because you remember both times.

So the plan that has been waited on all this time is not a plan. It is a condition that occurs roughly annually, and an entire family's outdoor life has been made to depend on it.

I am not saying the big afternoon is bad. It is lovely, and when it happens go. I am saying that a household which only goes out when the conditions are perfect is a household that does not go out.

You are free to enjoy the big afternoon when it comes and free to stop arranging a year around it, and it was never one or the other. Zechariah 4 puts the eyes of the Lord on a single course of stone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hold both of those without guilt.

What twenty minutes actually is

Here is where I want to correct something in the way the small version has been thought about.

Twenty minutes has been treated as a downgrade. A reduced offering. What is left over when the real thing cannot be managed.

It is not that. Twenty minutes is a different thing entirely, and it does something the whole afternoon cannot do, which is happen today.

You are allowed to stop waiting for the version that has not come, and you were never under any obligation to hold out for it. The passage refuses to grade a work by its size, which is exactly why the Holy Spirit is not asking you to produce a better one before you begin.

The afternoon requires agreement, weather, planning and everybody's calendar. Twenty minutes requires a door and a pair of shoes. Those are not the same activity in two sizes. They are two different activities, and only one of them is available to you this week.

Twenty minutes is not a rehearsal for something bigger, and the small day is not despised anywhere in the book.

You are able to do the thing that is actually available, and it has never once been a compromise to do the one that fits through today's door. Zechariah 4:10 sets the eyes of God on a plumb line rather than on a completed temple, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a small evening from being read as a failed afternoon.