A Jar of Buttons and Nothing Else

Her granddaughter came out with two glasses of tea and sat down one step below her and said, in the way young people say things, so tell me about your life.

And she said, oh, honey, there is nothing much to tell.

She has been sitting with that for about ten minutes now and the girl has gone inside to answer the phone.

The jar is in her lap. It was her mother's, and before that it belonged to a woman nobody in the family can name any more, and it is full to the shoulder with buttons: horn, shell, brass, four off a coat that was cut up for quilt pieces in nineteen fifty eight, a set of eight little white ones that came off nothing anybody remembers. She has had this jar on the shelf by the door her whole married life and she gets it down when she is thinking.

Seventy. And she said there was nothing much to tell, and she meant it when she said it, and now she is turning it over the way you turn a button over.

She has not been anywhere. She has not built a thing you could drive somebody past. She raised what she raised and she buried what she buried and she has kept this porch swept for forty six years and there is not one item in the whole of it she would have known how to hand that girl. The tea is sweating on the boards. The light is coming in low across the field and turning the whole yard the color of the brass buttons.

And here is the thing that has hold of her, and it is not sadness. It is that she heard herself say it. She said nothing much to tell out loud, in her own voice, on her own porch, about the only life she has, and she has said it a hundred times before without ever hearing it, and tonight she heard it.

You have said that sentence. Maybe in a car, maybe at a counter, maybe to somebody kind who asked. And it went past you every time until the one time it did not. The sentence has never been the problem. The problem is that you believe it, and the God who made the day and everything small in it has been on record against it for two and a half thousand years.

The question God asked out loud

I want to be careful right here, because there is a version of this that hands a woman a nicer summary and calls it comfort. It is not comfort. Telling her to count the people instead of the places is still counting, and she will be back out on this porch with a list in her lap. So I am not writing her a better summary. I am handing her a question that God asked first.

There is a scene in Zechariah where the temple is being rebuilt and the foundation they have managed to lay is small, and people who remember the old one are openly unimpressed. And into that God says a thing that is not an argument. He asks a question. For who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10).

He does not defend the foundation. He does not produce figures. He asks who despised it, which is the question you ask when somebody has been slandered in your house.

You are living in a day of small things that God has already defended out loud. That is not a soft reading; Zechariah 4:10 is a question with an edge on it, and the Holy Spirit who put it in the book left it as a question so that whoever is doing the despising has to answer it, including when the person doing it is the one living the life.

And notice how the verse goes on. They shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. A plummet is a plumb line, the smallest tool on the site, one weight on one string, and it is the thing in the builder's hand that the whole rejoicing is aimed at. God did not swap the small thing for a big one before He said rejoice.

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

The two words that carry it

Nothing much. Take those two words apart on the step, because they are doing all the damage and they are not the same word.

Much is a size word. Nothing is not. When she said nothing much to tell she meant, honestly, that there was not a great quantity, and that is arguable but it is not a lie. What the girl heard, and what she heard when she finally heard herself, was the other one. Nothing. And that is a lie, and it is not a small one.

This is yours tonight on the step, whatever the quantity turns out to be: a life that God's own eyes have been running over the whole time. The same verse says the seven are the eyes of the Lord which run to and fro through the whole earth, and the Spirit who wrote that put the eyes and the plumb line in one sentence on purpose, because He watches small work closely rather than in spite of itself.

It is already settled that He does not grade by size. Mark 12:43 has Jesus watching a widow put in two of the smallest coins there were, and saying she put in more than all of them, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that scene recorded the exact denomination so nobody could round it up.

Now let me name the thing underneath, because it is not modesty. It is this: if there is nothing much to tell, then I do not have much to be. That is the sentence, and a woman of seventy has been carrying it privately since she was about thirty, and she would not say it to a soul.

What is actually in the jar

Look at what she is holding, because the jar is the whole sermon and she has been getting it down off that shelf for fifty years without reading it.

Every button in there came off something. The four brass ones came off a coat somebody wore through two winters and then cut up for quilt pieces. The eight little white ones came off a thing nobody remembers, which means the thing wore out and was used and was let go of. None of these buttons were the point. They are what was left when the point had been fully used.

That is a life, and it is not a small one. Output is the coat. Fruit is what the coat kept warm, and where the person went in it, and who was carried by them, and none of that is in the jar and none of it ever could be.

You have grown a great deal that will not go in a jar and was never meant to. John 15:5 says the branch that stays in Him bears much fruit, and the branch is never handed an inventory; the Holy Spirit does the growing and He carries the fruit off in the direction of other people, which is where a swept porch and a made bed and forty six years of small things went.

So what does staying attached look like this week, and no, nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. Out here, in the ten minutes before the light goes, tell Him about one small thing from this week that could not be told to anybody. A button. A bird. Somebody you thought about. Then sit still long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody counts that. It is a branch sitting in a vine on a porch.