A Pot On For Four

It is the wrong pot. That is the first thing and it is not a small thing.

The big one is under the counter and she is not using it, obviously, for four people, and the one she has on is a family sized pot that has never once been used for anything that mattered.

Four. Two neighbors, one of the neighbors' nephews, and a woman from two streets over who is new and does not know anybody.

She used to do forty. Every Saturday for six years, in a hall, with a serving hatch and a rota and a woman called Pauline who did nothing but drinks and did it magnificently.

That ended in April. The kitchen failed and the money for the ventilation is not going to appear and everybody has been very sorry about it and nothing has changed.

So: four people, in her house, on a Saturday, at one o'clock.

And she cannot say the word. Her sister said, on the phone, so you are starting it up again, and she said no. Flatly. And then apologized for how flat it came out, and her sister let it go, and that is where it sits.

The sentence is not this is not the same. Obviously it is not the same. It is: calling four people lunch a beginning would be pretending, and I have watched people do that and I am not going to be one of them.

You know that pot. It might be four instead of forty, or one class instead of a school, or one person instead of a room. You are doing the same thing at a size you can manage, and you cannot bring yourself to give it the name, because giving it the name feels like dressing something up.

The size of the job that verse was said over

There is a line everybody knows and almost nobody knows the context of, and the context is a small, discouraging building site.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

That was not said over an army or a revival. It was said to a man rebuilding a temple that was, by common agreement, a great deal less impressive than the one before it. The people looking at it were disappointed. The prophet in the same chapter has to ask, plainly, who has despised the day of small things.

So the verse belongs to exactly your situation. It is what God says over a work that is smaller than the last one and that everybody is quietly measuring.

And notice what it removes. Not by might, which is human capability. Not by power, which is resources and structures and a hall with a serving hatch. By His Spirit, which was never in the ventilation system.

You are doing a work that runs on the Spirit of God, and it has never once run on the size of the kitchen. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman with the wrong pot on, and the Holy Spirit who was in that hall for six years is the evidence that nothing has been downgraded.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic at one o'clock. If it goes by His Spirit, then four instead of forty is information about ventilation and a budget. It is not a smaller version of who you are, and it never had the standing to become that.

You do not have to call it anything

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that matters to you today.

You said no to your sister. Flatly. And there was something real being protected: too many people calling a very small thing a great big move of God, and every time it made you wince, and you decided a long time ago that you would rather be under described than over described.

Nothing here is going to make you say the word. If it stays lunch, it is lunch. There is no requirement anywhere in this that you call it a start, or a new season, or the beginning of anything, and God is not waiting on the vocabulary.

And nothing here promises the numbers come back. Nobody on this page knows whether it is ever forty again, or whether four becomes six, and telling you that this is a seed would be exactly the kind of talk that makes you wince.

You have been carried through every week since April, and the carrying was never proportional to the pot. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work at that table for four rather than assessing the catering.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a pot. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not flattened into a no on a phone call. And the thing in the way is not the ventilation and it is not your sister. It is a sentence: calling this a beginning would be pretending. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority stirring a pot for four. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the forty.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than loss, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.