Hiya,
Hope you’re all hydrated and getting enough sun:)
Do you ever look at your hands and think about how hard it would be to sculpt them out of nothing?
Oddly enough, this is almost a weekly thing for me.
I have a fascination for the human body and how it’s put together, how it moves and stays alive, its brain and heart and all their moving parts–but most especially, I find myself thinking about and noticing hands.
I love hands and I always, always notice them. I love how they fit to humans. I love how they are perfectly shaped for other human hands, how they look, how they work.. Anyone who knows me well knows that when in states of doubt, boredom, or artist block, I subconsciously fill my sketchbooks with hands. I doodle hands on napkins in coffee shops, and I tend to have this outburst, probably with someone I barely know, once or twice a month:
“Your hands! They are so pretty. Aren’t hands marvelous?”
Chances are, that’s how we met. Sorry about that, by the way.
They are perfect for us. Can you imagine if we had paws? Or scary dragon hands? Or just awkward stumps of wrist at the ends of our arms? They really are marvelous, hands. God made them, out of practically nothing, He made our hands with His, and that’s breathtaking to me.
About a week or so ago, I woke up and looked at my hands. Brought them up into the dim orange light of the sun that hadn’t quite risen yet, and studied them. Fingers, fingernails, knuckles. All the little valleys and fingerprints. I’d gotten distracted and started thinking about how weird it must be to be a cell, when a verse presented itself somewhat unceremoniously in my head.
Nothing loud or unbearably groundbreaking. Just, “oh hey by the way, remember Exodus 9:33?.”
I recognized the reference of the verse almost immediately. (now it’s been about a week, and a couple days ago I started reading though Exodus for school—what a lovely coincidence).
At this point I wasn’t sleepy anymore and suddenly didn’t care about what life as a cell was like, so I grabbed my bible from underneath my bed in a bit of confused excitement.
“Then Moses left Pharaoh and went out of the city. He spread out his hands toward the lord; the thunder and hail stopped, and the rain no longer poured down on the land.”
I had an image of one of those Bible coloring book sheets, the ones with perforated edges and thick borders. A picture of a standard guy with a beard in a robe with his hands outstretched at the sky. The sort of thing we all scribbled on in Sunday school after the lesson while we waited for our parents to end their endless socializing sessions.
Moses did that with his human hands. Messy, flawed by nature and completely and totally unique, he raised his hands to the sky and storms stopped. All he was doing was listening to his father.
It made me think about all the things I’ve ever done with my hands—and all the things I’m getting ready to do with them. God worked miracles through Moses’ hands, so why shouldn’t He work through mine or yours or anybody else’s? Moses was a bit timid, a bit scared—heck, he basically hated public speaking—and look at what he did. He’s so neat.
I looked at my hands again after I read that, and suddenly I was a little encouraged. I have hands too! I could do those things.
The first stop once my squad and I leave the country is Eswatini, South Africa. Some quick research told me that Eswatini that time of year is rainy season. Lots and lots of rain. Buckets and buckets of it. I absolutely love rain.
Admittedly, I don’t know exactly what God has for me in South Africa or any of the other places either yet. But I’m eager to listen and ready to put my hands to good use.
🙂
