Zechariah 4:10 For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. “These seven are the eyes of the Lord, which range through the whole earth.”(ESV)
We love the highlights. We study David standing across the valley from Goliath. We study Moses at the burning bush. We study Noah building the ark. We study Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount. We study the cross, the empty tomb, Pentecost, miracles, battles, kings, prophets, and moments when God moved so unmistakably that thousands of years later we’re still talking about them.
Those moments are important, but they create a strange illusion.
Because when we read the Bible, decades can pass between paragraphs. We turn a page and years disappear.
David killed Goliath. But David didn’t spend his entire life killing giants. Most mornings, there wasn’t a giant. There were sheep.
Moses encountered God in a burning bush. But Moses spent forty years in Midian before that bush burned. He didn’t wake up every morning expecting history to happen. There were sheep to tend. There was work to do. There was another ordinary day ahead of him.
Even the life of Jesus is presented this way. We see His birth. We get a glimpse of Him at twelve years old. Then Scripture moves rapidly toward the beginning of His public ministry. Decades of earthly life pass quietly.
Think about everything hidden inside that silence. Meals. Work. Family. Neighbors. Sabbaths. Conversations. Mornings when the sun came up and evenings when it went down. Ordinary days.
Most of the earthly life of Jesus happened outside what we might call the highlight reel.
Maybe that should tell us something.
We’ve become very good at marking the highlights of our own lives. Birthdays. Weddings. Anniversaries. Graduations. Promotions. Vacations. Holidays. Accomplishments.
We even celebrate the changing of a number on a calendar every January as though time itself crossed some great cosmic boundary.
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating milestones. The danger comes when we begin believing the milestones are life.
They aren’t. They’re markers along the way.
Life is what happens between them.
Life is Tuesday afternoon when nothing particularly interesting happened. Life is the drive you’ve made a thousand times. Life is dinner. Life is dishes. Life is sitting beside someone after you’ve both run out of things to say. Life is the joke nobody else would understand. Life is noticing that someone looks tired. Life is sitting in the same room doing completely different things. Life is thousands upon thousands of moments that seem too insignificant to remember. And because they seem insignificant, we can become careless with them.
We begin expecting our friends to entertain us. We expect our families to give us stories worth telling. We expect relationships to continually produce excitement. We expect our faith to give us mountaintops, breakthroughs, revelations, miracles, and moments when God’s presence feels impossible to deny.
Then an ordinary day arrives. Nothing happens. And somehow we think something’s wrong. But maybe nothing is wrong. Maybe this is life.
David had days without giants. Moses had days without burning bushes. Elijah had days without fire falling from heaven. The disciples walked a lot more miles than they walked on water. And Jesus lived ordinary days that Scripture never recorded.
God wasn’t absent from any of them.
We’ve confused memorable with meaningful. They aren’t the same thing.
Some of the most meaningful moments of your life will never become stories because there isn’t enough of a story to tell.
Nothing happened. Nobody accomplished anything. Nobody said anything profound. For a moment, you simply existed beside someone you loved.
Then somebody coughed. The dog barked. A phone rang. Someone remembered something that needed to be done. And life continued.
We usually don’t recognize those moments while we’re inside them. We recognize them when they’re gone.
We remember the ordinary chair someone used to sit in. The voice that used to come from another room. The routine that used to annoy us. The person we could sit beside without needing to say anything.
Suddenly the moments that seemed insignificant become priceless because we discover there won’t be any more of them.
Maybe we shouldn’t wait until then. Maybe today isn’t merely the space between two important moments. Maybe today is one of them.
Maybe nothing spectacular needs to happen for this day to matter. Maybe nobody needs to accomplish anything extraordinary. Maybe there doesn’t need to be a giant. Maybe the bush doesn’t need to burn. Maybe today can simply be today.
Because the highlights interrupt life. The moments between them are where we actually live.
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