The Emails You Stopped Opening

You used to read all of them.

That is the part of this you keep going back to. At twenty-four you read every single one, properly, all the way down, and you cried at some of them, and you kept a list on the fridge, and once you stayed up until two in the morning reading about a place you had never heard of before that evening.

You are thirty-nine now and you delete them by the block. You do it on a Tuesday morning, thirty at a time, without opening a single one, and it takes about eleven seconds.

You noticed yourself doing it about eight months ago and something in you went cold.

Because here is the sentence that arrived while your thumb was moving: I have become the kind of person I used to feel sorry for.

You have not said that out loud to anybody. What would you even say. And so it has sat there for eight months, and it has quietly attached itself to a lot of other things, and the current position is that you are fairly sure your heart has gone hard and that this is what happens to people and that it is probably permanent.

I want to take that verdict apart, because it is wrong, and because it is doing far more damage than the deleting ever did.

Somebody in Zechariah despises a small day and God names it

There is a line in a small prophet that people quote as encouragement and that is actually a rebuke aimed at a very specific attitude, and the attitude is one you have picked up without noticing. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

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

The context matters. They were rebuilding a temple and it was nothing like the old one, and there were people standing about who had seen the first one and who were, in the plainest terms, unimpressed.

And the question God asks is not who has failed to work hard enough. It is: who has despised the day of small things.

Despise there means to look at something small and assign it a value of zero. To see it, correctly, as small, and then to conclude from its smallness that it does not count.

Now here is why that is your verse and not somebody else's.

You did not stop caring. You stopped believing that anything you could do would register. And once a person believes that, opening the message is simply a way of being made to feel it again for no purpose, and the deleting is not hardness, it is a bruise protecting itself.

You have a heart that has been overwhelmed and not a heart that has gone hard. The written word puts the fault in despising the small day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls a small thing significant, and there is not one line anywhere that measures a person's love by how many appeals they can stand to read.

The scale was never yours to hold

Let me be plain about the mechanism, because you are someone who likes to understand a thing before she trusts it, and because the written word and the Holy Spirit are both on the side of your understanding it.

At twenty-four you could read those messages because you still believed, without examining it, that reading them was a form of doing something.

At thirty-nine you know that it is not, and knowing that is not cynicism, it is accuracy. And an accurate person who has no available action and keeps taking in the need is simply being injured on a weekly basis for nothing.

Your soul did the sensible thing. It closed the intake.

The trouble is that it closed the whole intake, including the parts where you could actually act, and that is why the flatness has spread to your own street, which is what has really been frightening you.

You are not required to hold the scale of the world. His word never once hands that to a person, and the Holy Spirit distributes assignments in sizes a human being can carry, and the smallness of your part is a mercy and not an insult.

The plain hall and what it actually did

There was a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and what that hall became known for was rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

Not a national program. Not a campaign. The streets around it.

And the individual actions in that work were almost comically small when you read the accounts. A meal. A bed for a night. Somebody walked home. Somebody sat with. Nobody in that building ever attempted to hold the scale of Los Angeles in their chest, and if they had, the hall would have closed inside two years, because nobody can carry that and keep going.

The smallness was not a limitation they were working around. It was the method.

You have a near thing that is exactly your size, and the written word calls the day of small things something not to be despised, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands out parts.