It Showed Up On My Hands First

Everybody talks about the face and almost nobody warns you about the hands.

That is where it arrives first, for most women, and it arrives earlier than anywhere else, and it does not ask.

The skin over the back of them changes. There are marks that were not there. The veins sit differently. And there is a moment, usually in a photograph or in a shop when somebody is handing you change, where you see them and something goes quiet in you.

And then, at some point that nobody could date, the hands went under the table.

You will know if this is you. In a restaurant, in your lap. In a meeting, wrapped around a cup so that only the fingers show. In photographs, behind somebody, or holding something, or in a pocket.

It is not a plan. It is a set of small movements, made continuously, that add up to something quite large.

I want to say the first thing very plainly, and then we will get to the rest.

Those are the two things that do everything you do.

What is under the table

Take an inventory for a moment, because I do not think anybody has.

What is under that table has fed people for thirty years. It has held a newborn and a dying person, sometimes the same week. It has done work that produced money, and care that nobody ever paid for, and the second kind was mostly the harder kind.

It has written things down. It has held on. It has let go, which is harder. It has been the first thing everybody in your family reaches for, and it has given care to every one of them.

And every single mark on it is from that.

You are looking at a record of work rather than at a decline, and not one of those marks arrived without a reason behind it. Isaiah 49 says behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands, and the Spirit of God is what turns a pair of hands back into a history.

Sun on a steering wheel. Water and detergent, twenty thousand times. Whatever happened to that knuckle in 1998 that memory dropped and the hand did not. Skin gets thinner with the years, and everybody's does, and it is not a fault and never has been.

So what is under the table is an account of a working life, and it has been put out of sight because a photograph made you uncomfortable once.

You are hiding an account of everything you have ever done for anybody, and those marks have never once been evidence against you. The Holy Spirit is what makes a woman take an inventory of a thing she has only ever assessed, and Isaiah 49 says whose palms have something written on them.

And here is the cost, which is not abstract.

Hands out is how people talk. Hands do half of a conversation, and when they go into a lap the whole body follows them in a small way, and the other person feels a distance they cannot account for.

You have been quieter in rooms for years and thought it was your mood.

You are absent from your own conversations in a way you have never connected to a table, and it has never once been about anything except two hands. Scripture in Isaiah 49 has God speaking about palms and names, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a woman's hands back up where the talking happens.

Graven upon the palms

There is a verse in Isaiah where God answers a woman who thinks she has been forgotten, and He answers with His hands.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:16, King James Version)

Graven. Cut in. Not written, not noted, not remembered. Cut into the palms.

He does not say I have you in mind. He says look at my hands, the name is on them, and the marking is permanent because that is what graven means.

You are somebody whose name is cut into the palms of God, and there has never once been a place He put it where it could be hidden. It is written in Isaiah 49 that He has graven thee upon the palms of His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear that as being about hands and not only about memory.

Now sit with what that does to the whole subject.

The place God chose to keep your name is the exact part of a body that shows the most wear. Palms and hands are where work goes. Anybody who has ever done anything with their hands has the record of it on them, and God chose that surface deliberately, in a verse about not being forgotten.

Marked hands, in that verse, are the proof of love rather than the evidence of decline.

You are looking at the surface God chose for a permanent record, and marks on a pair of hands have never once meant what you have been reading them to mean. The Spirit of God is what turns a woman's own hands into something she can look at, and the written word says I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.

One conversation, hands up

So here is the assignment, and it lasts one conversation.

Keep both hands above the table for one whole conversation this week.

Not all week. One conversation, with one person, in one room. Hands on the table, or on the arms of a chair, or moving the way hands move when somebody is talking.

Two things about it.

Do not look at them. This is not an exercise in getting comfortable with the sight of them, and staring at them mid conversation would be another kind of inspection. Just leave them up and pay attention to the person.

You are able to leave your hands where they are and attend to somebody else, and no conversation anywhere has ever once been about them. Isaiah 49 puts a person's name on the palms of God's own hands, and the Holy Spirit is what takes a woman's attention off her hands and puts it on a face.

And do not explain. Nobody is going to say anything, because nobody has ever once been looking, and if you bring it up you will have made the room aware of a thing that was not in it.

What you will get out of it is a whole conversation with your body in it, which is not a small thing after years of being partly under a table.

You are able to be present in one room with your whole self, and there has never once been a rule that half of you had to stay in your lap. The written word in Isaiah 49 puts a name on the palms of God, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one conversation with your hands up into an act of care.