Ten Past Three, Every Day

The chain link at Bellwood Elementary has a bowed section about eight feet from the crossing, where a truck backed into it years ago, and Walt Hendrie stands in the bow of it every school day at five to three, because from there he can see the third grade door before anybody else can.

He is not early because he is eager. He is early because parking on Ferris Street after three is a lost cause and he learned that the first week.

So he stands. Twenty minutes, hands in his coat pockets, watching the flag rope tick against the pole. Sometimes Della from two streets over stands with him and tells him about her hip. Mostly he stands on his own.

At ten past three the doors go, and the noise comes out ahead of the children, and then Nell comes down the ramp with her bag on one shoulder and her coat not on, and she says "Grandpa" the way she has said it for four years, like she is faintly surprised he came, and he says "Right then," and takes the bag.

They walk the four blocks. She tells him about a boy called Marcus and a thing with a ruler. He says uh huh in the correct places. At the corner of Ferris and Bell he takes her hand for the crossing and lets go on the far side, because she is nine now and that was the arrangement they came to.

That is the whole thing. That is the entire contribution of Walter Hendrie, sixty eight, retired from the water department, to the visible good of the world.

He knows it, too. He is not bitter about it. He would just tell you, if you sat down with him, that he never did anything much. His wife did the things. Ellen ran the food drive out of their garage for eleven years and knew every family on three streets by name and what was wrong in each house. Walt carried the boxes out to the car.

Ellen has been gone two years in March. Their daughter went onto nights at the hospital in the spring. So there is Walt at five to three at a bowed piece of chain link, doing the only thing anybody has ever actually needed him for.

If you asked him whether it was enough he would look at you like you had said something a little rude, and then he would say no. Not sadly. Flatly. The way a man reads a gauge.

Because enough is a word with a size to it. Walt knows the size of what he does. It is four blocks long, and it happens once a day.

The day everybody wanted to be bigger

There is a scene in the book of Ezra that almost nobody preaches, and it is the truest thing in the Bible about a small day.

They had come back from exile and laid the foundation of the second temple. The younger men shouted. And the old men who had seen the first house, the one with the gold on it, wept out loud, because what was in front of them was so obviously less. Ezra 3:13 says the noise got so mixed that nobody could tell the shouting from the weeping, and the sound carried a long way off.

That is the room. Half of it celebrating a foundation, half of it grieving the size of the foundation, and God has not said a word yet.

When He does say something, it comes through Zechariah, and it is not a pep talk. It is a question with an edge on it.

You are standing in a day of small things, and the written word has never once treated that as a defect to be corrected. I am not softening the size of it for you. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despised the day of small things, and it is asked as a rebuke to whoever was doing the despising, and the Holy Spirit is not gentling that question down as He hands it to you. He is handing it to you with the edge still on.

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

Look at what is in Zerubbabel's hand in that verse. A plumb line. A weight on a string, the most boring tool on any site, the thing you hold against a wall to find out whether it is straight. Not a banner. Not a crowd. A string with a weight on the end of it, held by a man doing the next small correct thing.

And then the eyes of the Lord, running through the whole earth, and what they have stopped on is that.

You have a plumb line in your hand, and the work in front of you is the actual work, not a placeholder for the real one that starts later. That is the order Scripture puts it in, plainly, and nothing in the passage suggests otherwise. What His Spirit does with a line like that is not talk you up. He simply refuses to let you keep calling the wall a rehearsal.

What the word enough is a unit of

Enough is a measuring word. Measuring words are useless on their own, because every one of them needs a standard sitting behind it, and the standard is always set by somebody.

So who set Walt's?

Ellen did, and she never meant to, and she would be appalled to know it. Eleven years of a food drive in a garage. Names and streets and what was wrong in each house. She was extraordinary in the ordinary way that some people are, and she never once compared him to herself, and he has been comparing himself to her since about 1987.

Now here is where a certain kind of article would turn around and tell you that Walt is secretly extraordinary too, that if you look closely enough the four blocks are actually a monument.

That is not true, and it would not help. Walt is ordinary. He is a retired water department man who walks his granddaughter home. There is no hidden greatness in him waiting to be discovered, and telling him there is would only hand him a second thing to fail at.

You are ordinary, and ordinary was never the obstacle in any of this; ordinary was always the material. That is not flattery, and Scripture never bothers with flattery. A plumb line, a string, a weight, a wall that is only a foundation so far, and the eyes of the Lord running through the whole earth and stopping there. The same Spirit who moved on that half built wall is not looking for a better version of you before He settles on this one.

The measuring is the part to look at again.

Somewhere along the line you started auditing your own life, and you have been doing the audit and setting the standard and reading out the result, all three, by yourself, in your own head, on a sidewalk, at five to three.

You were never handed the scales, and a man cannot be failing at a job that was never given to him. Zechariah 4:10 puts the seeing in the eyes of the Lord and the plumb line in the hand of the worker, and it keeps those two in different hands on purpose. His Spirit does not argue you out of your verdict so much as quietly point out that you had no standing to pass it.