The Quiet Of A Small Room

Aoife knows the exact texture of the hour after they go home, and she has never described it to anybody.

The evening itself is good. Six of them, sometimes seven. The kettle, the chairs that do not match, a conversation that goes wherever it goes and usually ends up somewhere real, and prayer that is not performed because there is nobody there to perform it for.

Then they leave, one at a time, taking longer than they mean to at the door.

And then there is an hour.

She stacks. She washes four mugs. The room goes back to being a room, and it is very quiet, and there is a particular quality to that quiet that has nothing to do with loneliness because she is not lonely and quite likes being on her own.

And then, at some point, usually with a cup of tea she does not need, she picks up her phone.

That is where the noise is. Not in the room. On a screen, in her hand, in the hour after: a conference she was not at, a photograph of a room with the back of it out of shot, somebody she trained with announcing a thing with genuine gladness and no thought of her at all.

None of it is aimed at her. That is what makes it hard to name as a problem.

It simply arrives, weekly, into the quiet, at the exact hour when a person is most porous, and it says the same thing every time without ever using words: this is what it looks like when it is working.

You have your own version. There is a quiet after your thing, and there is a screen, and you have never once put those two facts next to each other on purpose.

Nobody here is going to tell you to come off your phone. That is advice, not ministry, and you have heard it.

But there is a verse in Zechariah that names what happens in that hour, and it names it as a temptation rather than as a fact about your room.

The verse assumes somebody will despise it

There is a line in Zechariah spoken while a very small building project is going badly, and the shape of the sentence is the important part.

For who hath despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

It is a question, and it is a rhetorical one, and rhetorical questions in Scripture almost always assume the answer is embarrassing.

The people rebuilding that temple were doing it on a footprint that made the old men cry, because they remembered the first one. The comparison was in the room from the beginning. And into that, God does not say the small thing will become big. He asks who despises it.

Which tells you two things at once.

That the despising is expected. Somebody will, and the verse would not need asking otherwise, and quite often the somebody is the person doing the work.

And that the despising is the error rather than an accurate assessment. The question is not why is it small. It is who is doing the despising, which puts the fault in the looking rather than in the thing being looked at.

And the smallness of your room is not the problem in that sentence. That is not my reading: the written word puts the question on the despiser rather than on the day, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman washing four mugs.

And your room is not a stage on the way to something. The word calls it the day of small things and defends it as it is rather than promising it will become another thing, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real dignity rather than a holding position.

Why the hour is the hour

Here is the practical part, and it is about timing rather than about character.

Aoife is not envious in general. On a Thursday afternoon she can see the same photograph and feel nothing but genuine gladness for the person in it.

It is the hour. It is a woman in a quiet room, slightly emptied by having given out, holding a screen at the precise moment when her own week has just gone by without producing anything visible.

That is not a spiritual weakness. It is a person being tired at the same time as being shown a highlight, and there is nobody alive who does well in that combination.

Which means the thing to know is not I must not compare. It is: this happens in that hour, and it happens because of the hour.

And the emptiness after giving out is not a sign that something is wrong. The word says virtue went out of Him when a woman touched His garment, and He noticed it, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person recognize the cost of giving without treating it as a fault.

And you are not being measured against anybody. The word says they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise, and it is said flatly rather than harshly, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a rescue rather than a rebuke.

Nobody is telling you to grow it

I want that clear, because this is where a message about a small room usually suggests, warmly, that it might not stay small.

Nothing here says that. Your room may be six people for the rest of your life, and that is not a problem to be solved, and Zechariah 4 does not resolve the smallness, it defends it.

And nobody is telling you to feel differently about your friend's announcement. Your gladness for her is real, and it is real on Thursdays, and one bad hour a week does not undo it.

What is on offer is only the naming: the hour is the hour, the despising is the error rather than the assessment, and the room was never a waiting room.

And these people are not a stage. The word tells shepherds to feed the flock which is among you, and among you is the whole assignment, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true about six chairs that do not match.