Quiet Is Not the Same as Finished

I have watched a good many people make this particular mistake, and I have made it myself, so I will not be lofty about it.

The mistake is short. It is this: things went quiet, and I read the quiet as an ending.

That is all. It happens in about a week, usually, and then it lasts for years.

Here is how it goes. There was a stretch when a great deal was happening. People rang. Things were asked of you. You were in the middle of something and the days had a shape that came from outside yourself and you did not have to manufacture any of it.

Then everything happened, whatever your everything was, and afterwards it went quiet.

Not unfriendly. That is what I want to be careful about, because people expect the story to be that everybody turned on them, and mostly they do not. Mostly the phone simply does not ring in the same way, and nobody decided that, and nobody could tell you when it changed.

And in that quiet, without any conscious step, a person reads a verdict.

The verdict is: that was the part where I was of use, and it is over. And once that verdict is in, everything afterwards is interpreted through it. A quiet week is evidence. A good week is a nice exception. Something small that comes your way is a kindness rather than a calling, and gets treated accordingly.

Now I have to say the hard half, and I will say it plainly because plain is what I have got.

Quiet is not a verdict. Quiet is a volume. And a great many people in Scripture were doing the most important work of their lives during the quietest stretch of them, and I would go further and say most of them were.

I am not going to ask you what happened. It is not mine and I do not want it and this message works without it.

What I want is the week the phone changed.

The verse does not tolerate the small day, it is glad about it

Zechariah has a sentence in it that most people know as half a rhetorical question, and it is worth reading whole.

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

The setting matters. There is a temple being rebuilt, and it is smaller than the one before it, and the old men who remembered the first one had wept when they saw the foundation of the second, because it was so much less than what had been.

So this is not a verse about a person who has never had anything. It is spoken directly to people who had something bigger and are now looking at something smaller, and who are being watched by other people who also remember.

That is your exact situation.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say the small day is acceptable. It does not say be grateful for it, or make peace with it, or accept the reduced circumstances with good grace. That would be the consolation voice, and this is not that voice.

It says they shall rejoice. Gladness, over a small thing, out loud.

Here is what that puts into your hands this morning. You are in a small day and not a finished one, and Zechariah 4:10 has God being glad about exactly this size of thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a quiet stretch and a closed account when a person has stopped being able to.

Look at the second half too, because it is the reason for the gladness. They shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. A plummet is a plumb line, a builder's tool, the thing you hold to check that a wall is going up straight.

That is what makes the small day worth rejoicing over. Not the size of it. The fact that somebody is still building, and building true.

And the plumb line is in a hand. Somebody is holding it. The verse does not say the work is going well because the workers are strong; it points at a hand and a tool and a wall that is straight, and that is the whole basis of the joy.

You are being built rather than wound down, and Zechariah 4:10 puts the gladness on the plumb line and not the scale, and the Holy Spirit has been the hand on that line through every quiet week you were reading as evidence.