The Number That Has Not Moved

She wrote it in the corner of the whiteboard in green because green was the pen that worked.

It was a Tuesday in the January two years ago, and it was meant to be a small encouraging thing. A number, in the corner, so that everybody could see the thing moving.

The number is fourteen.

It was fourteen at the start. It went to sixteen in the first spring, which was a very good week, and then to fifteen, and then back to fourteen in the autumn, and it has been fourteen for about eleven months.

Nobody wipes it. Nobody mentions it. It is written slightly too small to read from the doorway, which Ruth thinks may be why it has survived.

And she has developed a habit that she is not proud of, which is that she comes into that room and stands with her back to that corner.

Not deliberately. She just finds that she is always facing the window.

She has thought a great deal about why the number gets to her, because she is not a person who needs constant wins and she knew going in that this would be slow. What she has landed on is this: the number is the only thing in the room that has an opinion about her.

Everything else in that work is ordinary. Emails and lists and a boot full of things and a folder. But the number sits up there in the corner in green and says, once a week, without any malice at all, nothing you did since January has changed me.

And two years is long enough that she has started doing sums about herself. What if the whole approach is wrong. What if it is her. What if this is one of those things a different sort of person would already have got moving, somebody with more of whatever it is.

In June she caught herself thinking about wiping it off, and she did not, because taking it down felt like an admission, and leaving it up feels like a slow reprimand, and she is stuck between those two.

And you may have your own number, and yours may not be on a wall. It may be a figure you check, or a list of names, or a date you set once and have gone past.

Scripture names the error, and His Spirit is the one who sees the real work

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for eleven months and it was never yours.

You are not the measurer of this work. You never were. Scripture takes the assessing of small beginnings and names despising them as the error rather than the realism, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a figure in green in a corner, who reports on what is actually happening. Set it down here. It is heavy and it has had you standing with your back to a wall.

Now hear the sentence, and hear how blunt it is.

Who dares despise the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

That is spoken over a building project that had been stalled for years, to people who were comparing what they had managed with what had stood there before, and finding it pitiful.

And God does not say it will get better, and He does not say actually it is bigger than you think. He asks who dares to despise it.

Which means despising is what He is naming as the wrong move. Not slowness. Not the size of the thing. The despising of it.

And there is a great mercy in that, because it takes the whole matter of assessment away from you. You are not required to have a view about whether fourteen is good. You are required not to hold it in contempt, and that is a completely different and much lighter obligation.

You are able for that, right now, in that room, with your back to the corner. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who sees what is really going on in the work, and He has never once reported through a number on a wall.

Now here is the part I want to place gently.

There were people who worked forty years on one wrong, and for large stretches their numbers went backwards. Votes were lost more than once. There were years where the count of who agreed with them was smaller at the end than at the beginning.

If any of them had put a figure in green in the corner of a room, it would have flattened them, and several of them nearly were flattened, and what carried them was not encouraging data.

It was that they kept meeting, and kept the work in front of them rather than the score, and let the years be years.

Scripture asks who dares despise the day of small things, and His Spirit is the one who supplies what a long work needs in a flat stretch, and neither of them ever handed a person the job of grading the progress.

And I will say the honest half, kindly. The number is not the work. It is a description of one visible part of the work, chosen by you, in January, in green, before you knew what this would actually be like.

You do not owe it obedience.