The day of small things

Picture the scene at the second temple. The foundation is laid at last, after exile and ruin, and a shout goes up — but underneath the shout there is weeping. The old men who remember Solomon's house, the gold and the cedar and the glory of it, look at this modest rebuild and grieve at how small it has turned out to be. To them the new thing is an embarrassment beside the old. Into that mood the LORD speaks through Zechariah, and it lands like a gentle rebuke: who has despised the day of small things? The plummet, the little measuring weight, is in Zerubbabel's hand, and the eyes of the LORD are watching with delight over a beginning that everyone else finds disappointing. Jesus draws the same picture later with a seed. The Kingdom starts as the smallest of all the seeds, a thing you could lose in the crease of your palm, and yet it becomes the tree the birds of the air come and nest in. Renewal almost never arrives full-grown. It arrives small, easy to overlook, easy to scorn for not being what once was.

We have been trained to measure by the old grandeur, and so the first signs of God's new work look like failure. A handful where there were crowds. A flicker of hope where there was certainty. A foundation barely cleared where a cathedral once stood. And something in us wants to weep over the smallness rather than rejoice that anything is being built at all. But despising the day of small things is, finally, despising the way God almost always works. He is not impressed by scale the way we are. He delights in the seed, the plummet, the first faithful foundation laid by hands that could not finish the whole house in a day. So when the new thing in you or among you looks too small to matter, refuse the contempt. The eyes of the LORD are running over the earth, and they are not scanning for the impressive. They are resting, with joy, on the mustard seed nobody else noticed.