Hands That Stopped Obeying

She has been trying to thread the same needle for four minutes.

It is a number three, the one she has always used for hems, and the thread is the ordinary gray she buys six at a time. Forty years, this. Forty years of coats taken in and trousers taken up and a wedding dress that had to be finished by the Thursday, and in all of it she never once looked at the eye of a needle. Her hands did it while her eyes were somewhere else, the way your feet find the last stair in the dark.

Now she is at the table under the good lamp with her tongue between her teeth, and the thread goes past the eye, and past it, and past it again. Her thumb will not hold the angle. There is a hot band across the base of both hands that arrives before she is fully awake and does not leave, and the fingers that used to know things have started asking her permission for everything.

She puts the needle down. Then she picks it up again, because putting it down is worse.

Somewhere in the fourth minute she says a small hard sentence to nobody: I used to be good at this. Past tense. That is the sentence that actually hurts. Not the hot band across the knuckles. The past tense.

And this is where I want to sit down beside that table, because I know what the room does next. The room goes very quiet and very reasonable and it starts making a list. What you cannot lift. What you had to ask for help with on Sunday. What you have quietly stopped offering to do because you cannot promise you can finish it. The list is always accurate. That is what makes it so convincing.

But accurate is not the same as true, and there is a voice that has been in that room since before the lamp was on.

God speaks to hands

Here is something I love about the Word, and it took me years to notice.

God talks to body parts.

Not about them. To them. Through Isaiah, in the middle of a passage about a wilderness that starts blooming and a desert that starts singing, He turns and says a thing that has nothing to do with landscape at all.

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those with a fearful heart, be strong, do not fear.Isaiah 35:3

Read where that sits. The chapter is about a dry place getting water back. And in the very middle of the promise, the instruction is not pray about the hands, and it is not manage the hands, and it certainly is not explain to the hands why this happened. It is: strengthen them. Speak. Address them.

Now think about what kind of God says that.

He is not embarrassed by weak hands. He is not standing over the table with His arms folded waiting for you to try harder with a needle. He knows exactly what a weak hand is, He names it out loud without flinching, and then He tells somebody to go and put strength into it. That is not the language of a God who has lost interest in bodies. That is the language of a God who made yours and is still involved with it.

And He does not say over a thing what He is unwilling to do for it. He is not a man who tells you to feed the hungry and keeps the bread.

Let me name the pit properly, though, because I am not going to hurry past it. It is not the pain that takes the most from you. It is the demotion. For forty years you were the one people brought things to. The one who could fix the zip, carry the tray, do the wiring, plait the hair, tune the engine, ice the cake at eleven at night. Your hands were how you loved people. Nobody ever said that out loud, but that is what it was, and now the loving has to go through somebody else's hands and get asked for first, and asking feels like an admission.

That is a real grief and it deserves to be called one.

And into that, God says: strengthen the weak hands. Not replace them. Not let us pretend they are what they were. Strengthen. He goes to the actual hands you actually have, on the actual Tuesday you are actually in.

I am not going to promise you what tomorrow's hands will do. I am not the One who decides that, and anybody who tells you they know is selling something. What I can tell you, from the Word and not from my own feeling, is that God is not waiting for your hands to improve before He calls them His. And I will say the other plain thing too: keep every appointment, take everything you have been given, tell your doctor the truth about the pain. Nothing in this message asks you to put down one single thing that is helping you.