Six Pieces Are Carved And Twenty Six Are Not

Six.

Two pawns, both bishops, a rook, and the knight, which took three evenings and still looks more like a seahorse than a horse. They are in the cigar box with the rest of the blanks, and the blanks are cut and squared and waiting, and there are twenty six of them.

That is the number you carry. Not six. Twenty six.

I want to look at that with you, because I think it is the whole thing, and I think it is a habit of mind rather than a fact about chess pieces.

You began with six good evenings. Real ones. The kind where you looked up and it was later than you thought and your hands smelled of wood. And somewhere around the seventh evening the count flipped. It stopped being how many are done and became how many are left, and a mind that has started counting what is left does not stop on its own.

Twenty six is a large number when you hold it all at once. Two knights, which are the hard ones. Two queens. Sixteen pawns, and pawns are quick until you have made four in a row and would rather do anything else.

So the box shut. And the box has stayed shut, not because the work is hard, but because opening it means meeting twenty six again.

And there is a smaller thing under it, which I will say plainly. A half set is not a chess set. Six pieces cannot be played with. Until it is finished it is not a thing at all, and that means every evening you do not work on it, you own nothing.

That last sentence is the lie. We are going to take it apart.

Who hath despised the day of small things

There is a question God asks through Zechariah, and it is asked at a building site where the work is small and everybody knows it.

The second temple is going up and it is nothing like the first one. The old men who remember the first one weep when they see the foundation, because the comparison is brutal. And into that, God asks a question rather than making a statement.

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, King James Version)

Who hath despised the day of small things.

It is a question with an edge on it. Somebody is despising the small day, and God wants to know who, and He asks it out loud in front of a half built temple.

You are the one doing the despising in this workshop, and Zechariah 4:10 puts that question to you rather than to anybody else. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a question asked over a disappointing foundation and sets it down beside a cigar box in your study.

And look at the next image. The plummet in the hand. A plumb line is not a finished building. It is the tool you hold while the work is going on, and the verse says people rejoice at the sight of it.

You have a day of small things that God calls a day worth rejoicing over, and it is already settled in Scripture that the plumb line in the hand is the thing seen. His Spirit is the one who calls six pieces a day rather than a fraction.

Six is a number, and minus twenty six is not

Here is the arithmetic problem, and it is a problem of mind rather than of numbers.

Six carved pieces exist. That is a positive quantity in the world. Before you began there were none, and now there are six, and the difference between none and six is real and cannot be taken back.

Minus twenty six does not exist anywhere. It is not a quantity. It is a comparison between what is and an imagined complete thing, and comparisons of that kind always come out negative by design.

You did not do this because you are ungrateful. You did it because a chess set has an obvious finish line, and any project with an obvious finish line invites the mind to stand at the far end and look back.

You were never in deficit, and the number you carry is not a measure of the man at the bench. Zechariah 4:10 asks who despised the small day, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a man notice that the answer is himself.

And I will say the other part. Waiting until you can do it properly, in a run, with a clear month, is the same avoidance wearing a suit.

You are able to carve one piece on an ordinary Tuesday, and heaven has never once required a clear month first. The written word rejoices over a plumb line held mid build in Zechariah 4:10, and the Holy Spirit is entirely comfortable with a man who has forty minutes and gives twenty.

Twenty minutes, and start the seventh

So here is the ask.

Open the box tonight. Take out one blank. Not the queen, not the second knight, whichever one your hand reaches for, and if that is a pawn then it is a pawn.

Carve for twenty minutes. Do not count the blanks first. Do not lay the six out to see how they look together. Do not work out how many evenings the rest would take, because that calculation is the thing that shut the box.

It will not match. Your hand has changed in a year and the seventh piece will read slightly differently from the first six, and on a chess set that shows.

Let it show. A set carved by one man over years is supposed to show that. Do not sand the six to match the seventh and do not start the seventh over.

You are covered while the seventh comes out different, and Zechariah 4:10 is the ground under that. The written word rejoices over unfinished work in progress, and the Spirit of God is present in a study at nine at night with a lamp and a blank.