The Manual In The Glove Box

There is a book in that glove box and Ilan has never opened it.

It came with the car in 2021. It is about four hundred pages. It is in that plastic wallet with the service booklet and a folded map that predates the car, and every time he opens the glove box for something else, he sees it, and something happens in him that takes about a quarter of a second.

The thing that happens is a resolution.

Not a vague feeling. An actual resolution, quite specific, with words in it: I should go through that properly.

And it has now happened, at a conservative estimate, two hundred times.

Now here is the part I find genuinely interesting, and I think it is the whole of this.

Ilan is a reader. He reads difficult things. He has read books other people gave up on, and he has an actual practice of it, and he could tell you the last four things he finished and what he thought of them.

He has not read one page of a book that is sitting eighteen inches from his right hand.

And it is not because it is boring, although it probably is. It is because of the shape of the resolution.

Go through that properly is not a plan. It is a wish with a schedule attached that does not exist. It requires an evening, and a certain kind of evening, and a version of himself that is not tired, and none of that has ever arrived at the same time as the glove box being open.

Whereas read four pages about the dashboard symbols would take eleven minutes and could happen tonight.

But that thought has never occurred, not once in four years, because the resolution got there first and used up the whole space.

His wife said in July, when he was looking something up on his phone in a parking lot, "Isn't that in the book?"

And Ilan said, "Probably."

And she said, "Is the book in the car?"

And Ilan said, "Yes."

And neither of them said anything else, and he found the answer on his phone, and it took four minutes.

The resolution is what is stopping the reading

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you what is in your manual, because they differ and I have not got yours. And I am not going to suggest that a man who has not read four hundred pages of technical writing has done anything wrong, because that would be absurd and almost nobody on earth has.

What I want to look at is the two hundred resolutions, because they are the actual obstacle and they look exactly like the opposite.

Here is the verse, and it is a strange and wonderful one.

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

Now, the setting matters. The second temple is being rebuilt and the foundation has gone in, and it is small. Genuinely small. The old men who remember the first temple wept when they saw it, because it was so much less than what had been.

And into that room God asks a question, and the question has an edge on it: who has despised the day of small things?

He is not comforting anybody. He is defending something. He is standing in front of a small beginning and asking, out loud, who exactly has a problem with it.

And that is a very different posture from the one people expect. God is not waiting for the building to get impressive. He is objecting to the contempt.

You are not lazy about this, and Scripture puts God Himself in front of a small beginning objecting to anybody who looks down on it. It is written who hath despised the day of small things, which is a defense rather than an encouragement, and His Spirit is the one who makes that defense cover a man reading four pages in a driveway.

You have been despising your own small day for four years, and the passage names that habit and stands against it. Zechariah 4 has God taking the side of the foundation rather than the side of the men who remember something grander, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old building site an argument about a glove box.

Small is not a compromise, it is the actual size

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is a distinction that will outlast this subject.

There are two ways of doing a small thing.

The first is doing a small thing as a reduced version of a big thing. That is a compromise, and it feels like one, and a person who does it feels slightly disappointed in themselves, and that feeling is corrosive and eventually stops them doing anything at all.

The second is doing a small thing because the small thing is the actual unit. Not a fragment of a real task. A whole task, complete, correctly sized.

Four pages about the dashboard symbols is not a quarter of reading the manual. It is the whole of a thing called knowing what the symbols mean. It has a beginning and an end and it is finished when it is finished.

Two hundred resolutions produced nothing because they were aimed at a thing with no end. One correctly sized task produces a finished thing tonight.

You have permission to do a whole small thing rather than a fraction of a large one, and no verse anywhere ranks obedience by scale. Zechariah 4 has the Lord rejoicing to see a plumb line in a hand, which is a small tool at the start of a job, and the Spirit of God is what makes eleven minutes with a book an actual completion.

And I want to say the thing under this, because I think it is the true reason and it is not laziness.

The whole manual is a shape a man can measure himself against and always come up short. Four pages is not. So the resolution, in a strange way, has been safer than the reading, because a resolution is never finished and therefore never fails.

You were never being asked to complete the whole thing, and Scripture puts the rejoicing at the beginning of the work rather than at the end of it. It is written that the Lord's hands laid the foundation and His hands shall finish it, which is Zechariah 4 dividing the labor so nobody has to carry the whole of it, and His Spirit is what makes a start honorable in itself.