The Small Thing She Would Not Report

When they went round the room on Wednesday she said she did not have anything, and that was not true.

She had one thing. She has had it for about five weeks and she knows exactly what it is and she has thought about saying it three times, and each time she has got as far as opening her mouth and then let somebody else go.

Here it is. When her sister's name comes up now, she does not do the thing she used to do with her face.

That is it. That is the whole report. Not that she has forgiven her sister, which she has not, or not the way anybody would recognize. Not that they are speaking, which they are not. Just that when somebody says the name in a room, the thing that used to happen in her jaw and around her eyes does not happen, and it has not happened for five weeks, and she noticed it first at a bus stop and had to stand still for a second.

Yolanda is fifty-six and she has been in that church twenty-nine years, and on Wednesday nights people testify to things that are worth a room's time, and she knows what those sound like. She has given some. Twenty-nine years of Wednesdays gives a woman a sense of scale.

And on that scale, five weeks of a face not doing a thing is not a testimony. It is not anything. She would be embarrassed to bring it, and worse than embarrassed, she would be worried people would take it as a sign of how little God has been doing in her, when actually it is the only thing she has to point at in about three years.

So she says she does not have anything, and goes and gets the urns going, and that is her Wednesday.

If you have one small thing and you have kept it to yourself, hear the question. Who told you it was too small to say?

Somebody asked exactly that question

The context matters. There was a temple being rebuilt after the exile and the foundation was down, and it was a poor thing next to what people remembered, and there were old men in that crowd who had seen the first house and who wept, because this was so obviously less.

Into that, God speaks through Zechariah.

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

Who hath despised the day of small things? It is a rebuking question and it is aimed at the people doing the scale comparison, which is exactly what Yolanda does every Wednesday at half past seven.

And then look what He points at. A plummet in a man's hand. A plumb line. That is the smallest possible object in a building site, a weight on a string used to check one wall is straight, and God says it is being watched by the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.

The eyes that range over the entire earth are described as being on a builder's string.

You have something small that is already under the eyes of the LORD, and it is already being watched by the one whose eyes go through the whole earth. I am not being kind about a woman's five weeks. It is written in Zechariah 4:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a question asked over a disappointing foundation and puts it in a kitchen on a Wednesday night.

Why the small thing is the real one

And now let me say what a woman who has given real testimonies needs to hear about this one, because she has the scale wrong in a specific way.

The big ones are usually the loud beginnings of things. A deliverance, a night, a moment. Those are real and God does them and the room should hear about them.

What Yolanda has is different in kind. What she has is the thing that shows up after three silent years, in a face, at a bus stop, about a matter that is not resolved and might never be. Nobody worked that up. Nobody could. That is not the loud beginning of something, it is the quiet middle of something, and the middle is where most of the actual work of God in a person happens and it almost never gets a testimony slot because it does not sound like anything.

You are in the middle of a work and it is already going on, and the middle is where the most of it happens and the least of it shows. Scripture says the eyes of the LORD run to and fro through the whole earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is doing the slow thing in a woman across three years she thought were empty.

The reason it costs her to say it

And one more, gently, because there is a reason she keeps letting somebody else go.

If she says it and it is received as small, then she has to walk back to the urns knowing the room agrees with her about her own life. And she is not sure she could carry that on top of three years.

That is worth naming because it is the actual fear, and it is not vanity, and God is not impatient about it.

But there is a room in that verse that is already agreed. The eyes of the LORD are already on the plumb line. The verdict about the size of the thing has already been given, in Scripture, in a rebuking question, and the answer to who hath despised the day of small things is: not God.

You have a verdict already in from the only room that decides, and it was already written down as a question with an obvious answer. It is written who hath despised the day of small things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles the size of a thing before anybody in a hall gets a vote on it.