I Stopped Telling People The Number

It was at your cousin's, in the kitchen, and somebody asked how the saving was going.

And you said the number.

You were not showing anybody anything. You said it the way you would say how far it is to the coast, as a fact, because she had asked.

And a thing happened in her face.

It was small. It lasted about a third of a second and then she recovered and said something warm, and she meant the warm thing, and you have thought about the third of a second every week since.

Because you know what was in it. It was arithmetic. She heard the number and ran it against what a house costs, and her face did the sum before her manners caught up.

That was two years ago. You have not said the number out loud since.

Not to your mother, who asks. Not to the friend who is also saving and would probably tell you hers. You say it is going all right. You say slowly. You have a small set of sentences that are true enough to not be lying and vague enough that nobody's face can do anything.

And what it has cost you, and I do not think you have added this up, is that the only place that number now exists is inside your own head, where it has nothing to be measured against except the target.

What her face was actually doing

Let me be fair to your cousin for a moment, because I think the third of a second has grown in two years.

She did the same sum you do. She heard a number, measured it against the cost of a house, and registered the distance. That is the only comparison available to anybody in this culture, and it is the one you run on yourself every time you open the account.

She was not judging you. She was doing your own arithmetic back at you, with her face, and it landed hard because it was already the sum that hurts.

You were watching your own measurement come back at you in somebody else's expression, and one third of a second has never once been a verdict on two years of work. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that instruction in the mouth of a prophet standing in front of an unfinished building, and it is written in Zechariah 4 that we are not to despise the day of small things.

And here is what the silence since has done, which is the actual damage and is worse than the kitchen.

A number that is never said out loud cannot be seen by anybody. It gets no witness. Nobody has ever once looked at it and said, in two years, on what you earn. It lives entirely in the one place where the only thing it ever gets compared to is the thing it is not yet.

You have hidden a real thing so nobody could measure it, and hiding it has never once stopped you measuring it yourself. Zechariah 4 asks who hath despised the day of small things, and the Spirit of God is the one asking that question in a kitchen where somebody stopped talking.

The day of small things

Here is the line, and the setting behind it matters as much as the words.

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, King James Version)

The people this was said to had started rebuilding the temple, and what they had managed so far was a foundation, and there were old men there who could remember what the first temple had looked like and who wept when they saw the new one, because it was so much smaller.

That is the scene. A half built thing, being measured against a thing that was finished long ago by somebody else.

And into that, God does not say the building will be finished. He asks a question: who hath despised the day of small things.

You are standing in a day of small things, and God has never once described a day like that as a day of failure. The Holy Spirit is the one who asked it rather than explaining the shortfall, and the written word puts that question to people looking at a foundation next to a memory.

Notice what that verse also does not do, because this site does not promise anything and neither does the verse in the way people usually quote it.

It does not say your pile will become a house. I am not going to tell you that and the verse is not telling you that. What it says is that the small thing in front of you is not to be despised, which is a statement about how it is to be regarded, not a prediction about how it will end.

That is the whole correction, and it is enough. Nothing about the balance changes. What changes is who is allowed to sneer at it, and the answer turns out to be nobody, including you.

You have been the harshest reader of your own number, and no one on earth has ever once had the standing to despise what you put away. Zechariah 4 forbids the despising rather than promising the completion, and the Spirit of God is the one who drew that line exactly there.