I Despise Small Things In Myself

You are the person everybody calls when they are ashamed of something small.

Somebody rings you having done one thing after four months of doing nothing, and you say exactly the right thing, and you mean every word of it, and they get off the phone standing up straighter than they got on.

You are not performing when you do that. It is your actual view. You genuinely believe that a person who does one small thing after a long stop has done something significant and should be met with warmth.

And on Tuesday you did eleven minutes and came in and thought, well, that was pathetic.

Not as a passing thought either. You had a whole small internal event about it, and it included a review of how long it has been, and a projection of how long it will continue not being enough, and it took about forty seconds and it was thorough.

Here is the thing that ought to be obvious and is not.

Both of those are you. The same woman on the same day, holding two completely different standards, and applying the generous one to everybody in the world except one person.

You would never let anybody speak to your friend the way you spoke to yourself in the kitchen on Tuesday. You would find it unbearable. You would say something.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a question in Zechariah put to people rebuilding something that was not going to be as good as what came before.

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. (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

For who has despised the day of small things? They shall rejoice and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.

It is asked as a question and the question has an edge on it. Who has despised this. Somebody has, and God is asking who.

You have a verse that treats contempt for a small beginning as a thing worth challenging out loud, and Zechariah 4:10 has never once let it pass as realism. The question is asked directly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who asks it in a kitchen at half past six.

You are able to feel the difference between that and the way people usually handle this. Nobody says be nicer to yourself. God asks who is despising this, which puts the contempt in the open where it can be looked at.

And the setting matters enormously. These people were rebuilding a temple that was going to be visibly worse than the one their grandparents remembered. The old men who had seen the first one wept when they saw the foundation of the second.

So the smallness was real. It was not a matter of perspective. The thing genuinely was less than what had been, and God does not argue with that.

He argues with the despising.

You are able to have an accurate view of the size of something and refuse to hold it in contempt, and Zechariah 4:10 has never once required you to pretend it was bigger. The Spirit of God is the one who is present at a small foundation, and the verse challenges the contempt without disputing the measurements.

The kindness is already in you

Here is the practical part, and it is unusually simple.

You do not need to develop kindness toward yourself. You have an enormous supply of it and it is aimed in one direction.

You have the exact words already, and Zechariah 4:10 has never once required you to invent a gentleness you do not possess. It is written who hath despised the day of small things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a supply that is already in a person around to face them.

Think about what you would say to your friend. You know exactly what you would say. You would not have to prepare it. It would come out warm and specific and it would be true.

That sentence exists. It is fully formed. The only problem is that it has never once been pointed at you.

And the reason it has not is not a mystery either. Kindness to oneself feels like a lowering of standards, and there is a real and reasonable fear underneath it that going soft means stopping entirely.

That fear is worth answering directly: it has never happened to anybody. Nobody in history has stopped doing something because they were encouraged about it. They stop because of contempt. Contempt is what makes a thing not worth returning to.

You are able to be warm about your own eleven minutes without any risk to your standards, and encouragement has never once been what stopped anybody doing anything. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a woman turning her own generosity around, and Zechariah 4:10 challenges the despising rather than the accuracy.

Say it out loud

So here is the assignment, and the out loud part is not optional.

Do the ten minutes, then say out loud the sentence you would say to somebody else who had done it.

You are able to say to yourself what you say to other people all day, and hearing it in your own voice has never once been sentimental. It is written who hath despised the day of small things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen with a woman saying a sentence to herself out loud.

Out loud matters for the same reason it matters everywhere else. A thought is negotiable. A sentence said out loud in a kitchen has been said, and cannot be quietly amended afterward, and takes up a fixed amount of space in the room.

And say the real one. Not a hedged version. Whatever you would have said to your friend on the phone, in the same tone, with the same warmth, about eleven minutes.

You will feel ridiculous. Everybody does. Do it anyway.

You have been generous with everybody for years, and turning that around has never once been the same as going easy on yourself. Zechariah 4:10 asks who has despised the day of small things, and the Spirit of God is the one who asks it about the one person you have never asked it about.