It Stopped When The First One Was Born

You can name the last book you finished, and you can name the year.

That is the strange part. Most things that end in a life end vaguely. This one has a date on it, roughly, and the date is the same as a hospital bracelet and a car seat you could not work out how to fasten.

And then eleven years happened.

The children are older now. Two of them get themselves out of the door in the morning. There is an hour in the evening that did not exist in year three, and the hour sits there, and nothing gets read in it.

Which is the part that does not make sense to you, and it is why you are reading this instead of reading something else.

Because the reason has gone. The obstacle left the building. And you still cannot get through a page.

I want to say two things before anything else, because you have almost certainly met them both and neither one is coming.

Nobody is going to hand you a list here. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, not a shelf of things a woman your age ought to have read by now. There is no recommendation anywhere on this site, and that is not shyness. It is that being handed one has never once been the thing that got a book open, and it usually adds a specific book to the pile of things you feel behind on.

And nobody is going to say a word to you about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows about the phone, and hearing it again from a stranger returns nothing to you at all.

What I want to look at is much smaller than either, and I think it is the actual thing.

Nothing about your reading stopped when he was born. The size of it stopped.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a question in the middle of Zechariah that God asks out loud, and it is asked in a tone people rarely notice.

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; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth. (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

Set the scene, because the scene is what makes the question land.

A group of people are rebuilding something that used to be magnificent. The old men who remember the first one are weeping, because what is going up now is nothing like it. It is small. It is obviously, embarrassingly small, and the people building it can see that as clearly as anybody watching.

And into that room God asks a question, and the question is not "why is it so small". The question is who despised it.

He is not defending the size. He is objecting to the contempt.

That is a completely different sentence than the one people usually hear, and it is the one that matters for you, because for eleven years there has been a small amount of reading available and you have been declining it on the grounds that it is small.

You are not somebody who stopped reading, and eleven years of small has never once made a thing worth despising. Zechariah 4:10 has God asking who held the small day in contempt, which means the smallness was never the problem in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a woman with an hour she does not use.

Notice also what He does with the small thing. He does not enlarge it. He does not promise that next year it will be impressive.

He puts eyes on it. The eyes of the Lord, running to and fro through the whole earth, and they stop on the small thing.

You have the full attention of God on a page, and a page has never once been beneath His notice. It is written that they are the eyes of the LORD which run to and fro, and Zechariah puts them on a foundation people were ashamed of, and the same Spirit who said that is in the room tonight.

The reading did not stop, the size of it did

Here is the mechanism, and once it is visible the assignment will make sense.

Eleven years ago the reading happened in units of an evening. That was the shape of it: a chair, a lamp, two hours, forty pages, and the thing carried you from one Saturday to the next.

Then a baby arrived and that unit was destroyed. Not reduced. Destroyed, because a two hour block no longer existed in any week of any month.

And here is what happened next, and it happened without a decision being made anywhere. The activity was defined by the unit. So when the unit went, the activity went with it, and reading did not shrink to fit the new life. It stopped, wholesale, and was filed under things that belong to the person you used to be.

You are looked at by eyes that run through the whole earth and stop on small things, and a page has never once been beneath them. His Spirit is in that kitchen now, and it is written that they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.

Eleven years later the hour has come back. But the definition never got rewritten, and the definition is what is standing in the doorway now.

So every evening a calculation runs that nobody asked for. Is there enough here to be worth entering. And the answer keeps coming back no, because the thing being measured against is a two hour block from 2015.

That is not a willpower problem and it is not attention. It is arithmetic against an obsolete number.

You are working from a unit that stopped being true eleven years ago, and your capacity has never once been what failed here. Zechariah 4:10 refuses the contempt rather than the size, and the Spirit of God is at work on the small thing while somebody is still measuring it against the old one.

There is one more piece, and it is the tender part.

The unit was not just two hours. It was two hours belonging to a woman with nobody depending on her. So reading in the old size means being that woman again, and she is not available, and a small part of you has understood that any attempt is going to prove it.

That is why the hour sits unused. Not laziness. Self protection.

You have permission to read at the size your life actually is, and reading has never once required you to be the woman you were at twenty six. The written word puts the eyes of the Lord on a foundation and not on a finished temple, and the Holy Spirit is the one who guards a person going back to something she loved.

One page, and then put it down

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the half that does it.

Open any book tonight and read one page, then put it down.

Any book. It genuinely does not matter which, and it can be one off the shelf nobody has touched in years, or one of theirs off the floor, or one already read twice before the children came.

One page. Not a chapter, and not "see how it goes".

Then put it down, on purpose, while you still want to keep going.

You have the eyes of the Lord resting on a small thing, and eleven years of raising people have never once been eleven years of despising it. The Holy Spirit is the one in that kitchen with you, and Zechariah 4:10 objects to the contempt and never once to the size.

Here is why the second half is not a trick.

If the instruction were twenty minutes, a calculation would run, and the calculation would lose, because that is exactly what has been happening every evening for eleven years.

One page cannot be calculated. There is no version of your evening that does not contain one page, so nothing gets weighed and you go straight through the door that has been shut.

And putting it down is what makes tomorrow small too. Read forty pages tonight because you got going, and tomorrow the door has expectations behind it, and expectations are the two hour block coming back in through the window.

You are able to walk through a door that cannot be measured, and one page has never once had to justify itself against an evening. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despised the day of small things, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman opening something for ninety seconds after eleven years out.

You will feel that this does not count. Sit with that feeling for a second, because it is the same one that has kept you out, and its presence is evidence that you are at the right door rather than the wrong one.

You have a reader's whole life inside a single page, and eleven years away has never once undone what you are. It is written that the eyes of the LORD run to and fro through the whole earth, they came to rest on something small, and the Spirit of God rests on this the same way.