Putting Five Away Feels Like A Joke

You put five in a jar on Tuesday and took it out again before six.

Not because you needed it, particularly. You could have got through the evening without it. You took it out because at about half past five you looked at that jar and did the sum, and the sum was humiliating.

Five a week. That is a couple of hundred a year, if you never miss one, which you will.

And you have owed more than that on a single bill in a single month.

So you took it back out, and you felt slightly stupid for having put it in, and you have not put anything in since.

That is the whole thing this article is about, and I want to name what actually happened at half past five, because it was not a financial decision.

You did the arithmetic and the arithmetic humiliated you.

That is what always happens. Every time you put something small aside, some part of you immediately multiplies it out to see what it would come to, compares that against what you actually owe, and reports back that it is not worth doing. And it is right, on those terms. Five a week does not touch the thing you are worried about.

So the sum wins every time, and nothing ever stays in the jar, and you have concluded that you are not a person who saves.

I want to attack the sum.

Let me say what I will not do in this article, because it is the exact trap.

I am not going to project it forward for you.

I am not going to tell you what five a week comes to in three years, or point out that it is more than you think, or suggest what it could grow into. The moment I do that, I have played the same game as the voice at half past five, and I have handed you a plan, and a plan can fail. This is not a plan.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a question in Zechariah put to people who were embarrassed by how little they had to show.

For who hath despised the day of small things? (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

Who hath despised the day of small things.

The setting matters. A temple was being rebuilt, and the foundation that had been laid was pitiful compared to what had stood there before. Some of the older men who had seen the first one wept when they saw it, because the new thing was so obviously smaller.

And into that, God asks a question rather than making an argument.

Who has despised the day of small things?

Notice it is a rebuke aimed at contempt. Not at the smallness. Nobody in that verse is told the foundation is bigger than it looks, and nobody is given a projection about what it will eventually become. The thing being corrected is the attitude of the people looking at it and finding it laughable.

And notice the word day. The day of small things. It is a period, a real season with its own character, and it is being given standing. Not a stage on the way to something, not a shameful phase. A day, which is a thing you live in.

You are in one. And you have been despising it since Tuesday.

That is what half past five was. It was not a shrewd assessment of your finances, it was contempt, aimed by you at a small thing you had just done, and it was the same contempt those men had for a foundation.

The smallness is not the thing being corrected, and the contempt you turned on it has never once been shrewdness. Zechariah 4:10 asks who has despised the day of small things and gives that day its standing, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody taking five back out of a jar.

Kept is a different category from nothing

Here is the practical half, and it is the distinction the arithmetic keeps hiding from you.

Five kept and five spent are not close. They are two different categories.

The sum treats it as a difference of quantity: five is a very small amount of money, so keeping it is nearly the same as not keeping it. That is why it reports back that it is pointless.

But something changes at the moment you keep it that has nothing to do with the amount. Money that has been deliberately set aside is money that did something other than get spent, and there was no such money in your house last week.

You are not slightly better off. You have done a thing you were not doing.

And here is the part that matters more than the money, and I mean this plainly. What you have been telling yourself for years is that you are not somebody who saves. That is a description of a person, not a description of a bank account, and it is the reason you did not put anything in on Wednesday or Thursday.

One kept amount is the only thing in the world that contradicts it.

Not because it grows. Because while it sits there, in the jar, in the drawer, the sentence you have been carrying is not accurate, and you can look at the actual object.

So the question is not whether it is enough. Of course it is not enough. The question is whether it is kept, and kept is not a smaller version of spent. It is the other thing entirely.

Kept is a different category from spent, and a small amount has never once been the same as nothing. The written word rebukes the contempt and not the size, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has decided about himself that he is not a person who saves.

Put one amount away and do not do the sum

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the whole assignment.

Put one small amount somewhere separate today and do not calculate what it adds up to.

One amount. Today. Whatever you can actually spare without it costing anybody a meal, and if that is one dollar then it is one dollar and that is the correct amount.

Somewhere separate. A jar, an envelope, a different account, a tin at the back of a shelf. Separate is the requirement, so that it is not sitting in with money that gets spent by default.

And then the part you have never done: do not do the sum.

Do not multiply it by the weeks. Do not work out what it would be by Christmas. Do not compare it to the thing you owe. When your mind starts to run the numbers, and it will start almost immediately, stop it in the same way you would stop yourself picking at something.

You are not saving toward anything. There is no target and there is no plan, because a target is what makes this fail: a target invites you to measure progress against it, and against any target worth having, this amount will always look absurd.

There is only the keeping.

And do not tell yourself you will do it every week. That is a plan again, and a plan you have not kept once becomes a fresh piece of evidence about your character. Today's amount is today's amount. If you do it again next week that is a separate act, complete in itself.

And leave it there. That is the discipline: the money stays and the arithmetic does not happen.

You are able to keep it and leave the sum undone, and this has never once needed to be going anywhere to be worth doing. Zechariah 4:10 asks who has despised the day of small things without projecting anything forward, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody putting a small amount in a tin and walking away.