I Looked At All Of It And Did Nothing

You stood in the doorway again tonight.

You were not avoiding it. That is the part nobody gets. You went in there on purpose, you meant to do something, and you stood in the doorway and looked at it and your whole body just quietly said no.

And then you came back out.

Here is what I think happened, and I do not think it is what you think happened. You did not lack willpower in that doorway. Your eye did something. An eye takes in a whole room at once, all of it, in one go, and it handed you the entire room as one single object. And then some part of you looked at that one enormous object and asked where a person would even begin with it, and there was no answer, because there is no answer. Nobody begins a whole room. That is not a thing a person can do.

So you did not fail to start. You were handed something that has no starting place and then you were asked to start it.

I want to make it smaller. Not smaller in the sense of pretending it is not bad. It is bad, you can see that it is bad, and I am not going to talk you out of what your own eyes are telling you. Smaller in the sense of the actual task. Because the task you have been refusing is not the task. The task you have been refusing is impossible, and refusing an impossible thing is not a character flaw.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a line in the prophets that shows up in the middle of a building project that had stalled out for years.

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.

Notice it is a question, and notice who it is aimed at. It is not aimed at the man holding the plumb line. It is aimed at everybody standing around deciding that what he is holding is too small to count.

And notice it is called a day. Not a step, not a phase, not the first of ten. A day. The small thing gets a day of its own, named, with the eyes of the Lord running over the whole earth and stopping on it.

That is not encouragement. That is a correction of scale, handed down from the only one whose sense of scale is not broken.

You are allowed to begin at a size that actually exists, and the smallness of it has never once made it not a beginning. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despised the day of small things and never answers the question in the reader's favor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the sting out of small for a person who has been told small does not count.

The room is not one thing

Now the part I actually want you to see, because once you see it the doorway stops working the way it has been working.

The room is not one object. It only looks like one object because your eye is fast and it takes everything at once. But there is no such thing as a room in the way you have been picturing it. There is a table. There is a chair with a pile on it. There is a floor with things on the floor. Those are separate. They are not welded together.

You have been standing in a doorway negotiating with a thing that is not there.

And I think the reason it feels like one object is that the whole of it arrived at once, or near enough. It did not get like this a piece at a time in your mind. There was a stretch where everything was hard, and the room went, and now the room is the shape of that stretch. So when you look at it you are not looking at furniture. You are looking at a whole season of your life at the same moment, and no wonder your body says no in the doorway.

You are looking at a season and calling it a room, and the two have never once been the same size. The written word calls the small thing a day rather than a fragment, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates what happened to you from the furniture it left behind.

One surface the size of a tea tray

So here is what I am asking, and I want to be precise, because precision is the whole medicine here.

Clear one surface the size of a tea tray.

Not the table. A tray shaped piece of the table. Pick the edge nearest you. Take what is on it off it. Put those things anywhere, including the floor, including a bag, including back on the same table eighteen inches to the left. I am not asking you to deal with the things. I am asking you to clear one surface the size of a tea tray.

Then stop.

I mean stop. Not stop and look around. Not stop and think about the rest. Stop, and let that be the whole of tonight.

Zechariah 4:10 gives the small thing a day of its own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to stop while there is still mess in the room and not be crushed by it.

You are able to finish something tonight, and it has never once needed to be big enough to impress anybody. The word gives the small thing its own day and puts the eyes of the Lord on it, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person put a thing down and call it done.