A Cheap Day Feels Like Second Best

The afternoon was fine. That is the word that keeps coming back, and it is the word that bothers you.

You took them out. It was free. The weather held. Nobody was difficult. And you came home and somebody asked how it was and you said it was fine, and you meant it, and there was something underneath the word that you did not say.

Because the whole time you were there, you were grading it.

Not on purpose. It runs by itself. There is a version of an afternoon in your head that a family with more money is having somewhere else, and this afternoon kept being measured against that one, and against a version of itself that would have been better if things were different.

So you were never actually in the river with them. You were standing slightly outside it, marking it.

And the thing that makes this hard to talk about is that it does not look like a problem. You did the good thing. You took them out. Nobody could criticize you for anything.

But you did not get the afternoon. They did. You got a report on it.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a question in Zechariah, asked in the middle of a building project that everybody thought was too small, and it is asked as a question rather than as a rebuke.

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)

You have a question put to you in the written word rather than a verdict, and no small day has ever once needed defending against the one you keep imagining. Zechariah 4:10 asks who has despised the day of small things instead of scolding anybody for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman consider that honestly rather than defensively.

The setting matters. They were rebuilding a temple, and the people who remembered the first one had wept when they saw the foundations of this one, because it was so obviously lesser. The comparison in that story was real. Nobody was imagining it.

And the answer given is not that the new one was secretly bigger. The answer is a question about who is doing the despising, followed by the detail that the eyes of the LORD are running to and fro through the whole earth and are on this small thing.

You have the attention of God on the afternoon you actually had, and no comparison anybody has ever run has once moved His eyes off it. It is written that the eyes of the LORD run to and fro through the whole earth and rest on the small work, which is why the size was never the question, and the Spirit of God is what makes that specific to a Tuesday at a river.

And notice the verb. Despised. Not disliked. Not found lacking. Despised, which is a word about ranking, about assigning a low value.

That is precisely what the grading does. It is not that you had a bad time. It is that you assigned the afternoon a rank while you were standing in it.

You are able to stop assigning a rank to your own hours, and the ranking has never once been the same thing as an honest opinion about them. The Holy Spirit is the one who interrupts a running measurement in a woman's head, and Zechariah 4 puts the whole matter as a question about despising rather than about size.

The grading is what costs you the day

Now the practical part, and it is about a mechanism, not an attitude.

The comparison cannot be won. That is the thing worth knowing, because at the moment it is being fought as though a good enough day would settle it.

It cannot, because it is not a comparison with an actual day. It is a comparison with an imagined one, and an imagined day has no rain in it, no tiredness in it, and no argument in the second hour. Whatever you do, the imagined version stays slightly ahead, forever, because it is built to.

You are competing with something that does not exist, and no afternoon you ever give them has once been able to beat a day that was never lived. The Spirit of God is what shows a woman the shape of a race she cannot finish, and it is written that the eyes of the LORD rest on the small work rather than on the impressive one.

And here is the specific cost, which is what I actually want you to see. The grading does not make the day worse for your children. They had a good time. It makes the day not happen to you.

Because attention is the whole of being somewhere. A person standing beside a river deciding how the afternoon rates is not at the river. They are in a meeting about the river.

You are able to be in the afternoon rather than in a meeting about it, and being in it has never once required it to be worth more than it cost. It is written that they shall rejoice and see the plummet in the hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a woman's attention back into the hour she is standing in.

That is why this is not a lecture about gratitude. Gratitude is a different subject. This is about where your attention was between two and four in the afternoon.

One afternoon with no comparison in it

So here is the assignment, and it is a discipline rather than a plan.

Take one inexpensive afternoon and refuse to compare it to anything while it is happening.

Not afterward. During. And here is how, in practice, because refusing to think a thought does not work.

You are able to do something with the comparison other than argue with it, and no habit this old has ever once been broken by being contradicted. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person something to do instead of something to resist, and Zechariah 4:10 answers the despising with a plummet in a hand rather than with a better argument.

When the comparison starts, and it will, do not argue with it. Do not tell yourself the day is good. Instead, look at one specific thing in front of you and name it silently. The color of the water. What one of them is doing with their hands. The sound.

You are able to put your attention on one actual thing instead of on the measurement, and doing that has never once been you pretending the afternoon is more than it is. Zechariah 4:10 has them seeing the plummet in the hand, an ordinary tool in a real hand, and the Spirit of God is with a woman standing at a river bringing her mind back for the fourth time.

Naming a real thing beats arguing with an imagined one, every time, because the imagined day has no details in it and yours does. Details are what the grading cannot survive.

And plan on doing it repeatedly. Four or five times in two hours. That is not failure, that is the exercise, and by the end of it you will have been in about eleven minutes more of your own afternoon than you usually are.

You are allowed to come back to the same hour as many times as it takes, and needing to has never once been evidence of anything except a habit being interrupted. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps bringing a person back without impatience, and Zechariah 4 asks its question about the day of small things without any scolding in it at all.