One Street Against a City

What she actually does is this: eleven houses, a WhatsApp group nobody set up on purpose, and a bin rota.

She started it four years ago because an elderly man on the corner had a fall and nobody found him for a day and a half, and it turned out that nobody on that street had anybody's number. So she wrote a note and put it through eleven doors, and now there is a group, and it is mostly about parking.

But when it snowed, six people had their paths done in an hour. When the woman at number 4 had her baby there was a rota of dinners for nine days. When the man on the corner went into a home, four people from that street visited him, and two of them had never met him before the group.

She would tell you it is nothing. She means it. She said to somebody last month, and she was not fishing, it's eleven houses in a city of six hundred thousand, it's basically a bin rota.

And what sits underneath that is a genuine belief that she has spent four years on something too small to signify, while the actual work of God in that city, whatever that is, happens somewhere else and at proper scale.

That is your street. That is your eleven doors. And I want to answer that directly, because there is a question in Zechariah that is aimed exactly at what you just said about yourself.

Who despised it

The second temple is being rebuilt and it is a fraction of the size of the first one. People who remember the old one are openly upset about the scale of it. God asks a question.

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

Notice it is a question rather than a statement, and notice that it is not gentle.

He does not say small things are lovely too. He asks who is doing the despising, in a tone that expects an answer, about a building project that genuinely was much smaller than the previous one.

And the rest of the verse says they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. A plummet is a plumb line. It is the smallest possible tool, held by one man, checking one wall is straight.

That is the image God offers of what He is doing: not the scale of the thing, one man with a plumb line, and He puts rejoicing next to it.

You have a small work that God does not call small. Not a placeholder until something bigger. The written word puts a hard question to anybody who writes off a small beginning, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman with eleven houses and a bin rota.

Now let me say something about the city, because the comparison has been running unchecked for four years.

Six hundred thousand is a number. It is not a thing anybody meets. Nobody in this world has ever had a relationship with six hundred thousand people, and every good thing that has ever happened in that city happened on a street to somebody with a name.

You are not being outperformed by a scale that nobody occupies. The written word measures by faithfulness rather than by reach. The Holy Spirit is not comparing your eleven doors to a population figure.

And now the sentence itself: it's basically a bin rota.

That bin rota found a man who had fallen. It fed a woman for nine days after a birth. It sent four people to visit somebody in a home, two of whom had never met him.

You are not permitted to despise this. Who hath despised the day of small things?, and the question is put to everybody who does it, including the person doing the work. The Holy Spirit has been on that street for four years, in the snow and the dinners and the visits.