I’m getting older, and lately I’ve been noticing my hands. I don’t know exactly when they changed.
For most of my life, they were simply my hands. I rarely thought about them unless I needed them to do something. They typed and cooked and drove and carried and reached. They turned pages, signed papers, washed dishes, packed suitcases, wiped tears, and held other hands.
But sometime recently, I began looking at them differently.
The skin is thinner now, and the veins that I don’t remember noticing when I was younger are much more visible. There are lines and small changes that seem to have appeared gradually enough that I cannot say when they arrived. In certain light, there is even a delicacy to my hands that I don’t remember being there before.
Every once in a while, I look down at them and am startled by how much they have changed. They look like the hands of an older woman, which is, of course, exactly what they are. I am older. I know this. And yet there is something strange about seeing the passage of time made visible on a part of my body that has always seemed so familiar to me.
Perhaps that is why I have begun paying more attention to them. I find myself looking at these hands that now bear the years so visibly and thinking about all the earlier versions of them that I can no longer see.
There was a time when these hands held my babies. There was a time when tiny heads fit into the curve of my arm and little fingers wrapped themselves around one of mine. These hands changed diapers and buttoned clothes and fixed meals and buckled children into cars. They touched foreheads to check for fever and rubbed backs and held frightened children close.
They have reached for people I loved, sometimes finding another hand reaching back and sometimes discovering the particular sadness of reaching toward someone who was no longer willing or able to meet me there. There have been people I wanted to hold onto and could not, and others I eventually had to learn to release even when some part of me would have preferred to keep reaching.
My hands have done a great deal of ordinary work, too. They have typed thousands upon thousands of words over the years, writing books and lessons and training materials, preparing classes, turning pages of Scripture, and trying to put into language things I hoped might help someone understand themselves or another person a little differently.
But some of the work I remember most clearly involved very few words at all.
For many years, these hands have rested on tables across from people telling me things they had sometimes never told another human being. I have watched someone’s hands twist a tissue or grip the arms of a chair while they tried to find words for something they had spent years trying not to remember. I have watched people cover their faces when shame made being seen feel almost unbearable, and I have seen a hand reach tentatively across the space between us when what someone needed in that moment was not another question or explanation but the reassurance that they were not alone.
There are moments in this work when words are simply inadequate. Someone tells you what happened to them, and nothing you say can make what happened less terrible. Years of education and experience do not produce a therapeutic insight capable of undoing what another human being has endured. Sometimes there is nothing to explain and nothing that should be made more palatable by finding the right clinical language for it.
Sometimes what remains is simply the willingness to stay. I think my hands have learned that alongside the rest of me. They have reached across the space between another person and me and held a hand trembling with grief. They have passed tissues, wiped tears, and sometimes simply rested quietly when adding another question or another attempt to help would have asked too much of someone already carrying more than enough.
I learned much of that sitting in counseling rooms, but in recent years I have found myself carrying the same lesson much farther from home. These hands that spent so many years turning pages and typing words have also packed and unpacked suitcases, carried passports through airports, opened classroom doors in another country, and held papers covered in a language I am still slowly learning to read.
And they have reached for Ukrainian hands.
I have sat with people whose hands carry stories very different from mine: people who have buried someone they loved, people waiting for someone serving at the front, people whose ordinary lives have been interrupted again and again by alarms and uncertainty, and young counselors learning how to sit with suffering for which no textbook could possibly have prepared them. I have watched them take notes while we talked about trauma and grief and the nervous system, knowing that for many of them these were not simply subjects to be studied. The things we were discussing belonged to the world waiting outside the classroom door.
There have been many moments in Ukraine when I have wondered what I could possibly offer in the presence of suffering on that scale. I arrive with years of training and experience, with books and presentations and carefully prepared material, and all of those things have value. I believe deeply in the work I go there to do. But being there has also reminded me of something I first learned sitting across from people in therapy: knowledge has limits, and there are places in human suffering where our expertise cannot reach.
In those places, perhaps what remains is much simpler. We can sit beside one another. We can listen. We can allow another person’s grief to be as terrible as it is without rushing to make it more bearable for ourselves. And sometimes we can reach across whatever space remains between us and offer a hand.
Again and again, I have found that what I can offer is much simpler than I imagine it ought to be. I can show up. I can listen. I can remain when someone’s suffering cannot be changed by anything I know how to do. I can offer whatever knowledge and experience I have, certainly, but I can also offer my attention, my presence, and sometimes quite literally the hand that is mine to extend.
I have been thinking about how often hands appear in Scripture and how frequently God seems to begin with what someone is already holding.
When Moses stood before God uncertain about what he was being asked to do and understandably doubtful about his ability to do it, God asked him a curious question: What is that in your hand?
It was a staff.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. It was an ordinary object belonging to an ordinary part of Moses’ life, something he presumably carried without giving it much thought. Yet that was where God began. Not with something Moses still needed to acquire or with some future version of himself who would finally be courageous or qualified enough, but with what was already in his hand.
I find myself thinking about the boy with the loaves and fish in much the same way. What he had was plainly inadequate to the need in front of him. Five loaves and two fish do not become sufficient for thousands of hungry people simply because they are offered sincerely. The inadequacy was real.
And yet Jesus did not seem troubled by that.
Perhaps that is the part of these stories that speaks to me differently now than it might have when I was younger. I have spent a great deal of my life wondering whether I had enough for whatever was being asked of me: enough strength to survive something, enough wisdom to make the right decision, enough knowledge to help someone, enough courage to go where I believed I was supposed to go, enough faith to trust God when I could not see what He was doing.
There have certainly been times when the answer was no. I did not have enough. I think I used to experience that primarily as a problem to solve, something that required me to become stronger, learn more, work harder, prepare better, or somehow find whatever I believed was missing in me.
I wonder now whether I misunderstood the question.
Perhaps God was never asking whether what I held was sufficient for everything in front of me. Perhaps He was asking whether I was willing to place what I had into His hands.
When I look back now, I can see how often God has allowed me to use them in ways I could not have anticipated. Perhaps that is part of what has changed about the way I see them. The veins and lines I notice now are evidence of aging, certainly, but they are also evidence that I have been here for a while, long enough for these hands to have participated in nearly every part of the life I have lived.
They have not always been gentle or peaceful hands. They have clenched when I was frightened and gripped steering wheels when I was angry. They have covered my face when grief became more than I wanted anyone else to see. They have folded themselves in prayer when I knew exactly what I wanted to ask God for and when I could barely find language for what I needed. There have been confident prayers over the years and desperate ones, along with prayers that probably amounted to little more than God, please.
There have also been seasons when these hands lifted easily in worship and others when doing so would have felt almost dishonest. There were times when I could not reconcile what I believed about the goodness of God with what was happening in my life, and I did not always know what faithfulness was supposed to look like when God seemed absent from circumstances in which I desperately wanted Him to intervene.
I understand some of that differently now, although I am cautious about saying that as though the passage of time has given me answers to questions I once could not answer. Many of those questions remain. What has changed is that I can look across a much longer stretch of my life than I could then, and from here I can see a faithfulness that was often impossible for me to recognize while I was living inside particular moments.
There is an image in Isaiah that has become more beautiful to me as I have grown older: “I the LORD your God hold your right hand; I am the one who says to you, ‘Fear not, I am the one who helps you.’”
I think for much of my life I imagined faith partly in terms of my ability to hold on to God. Perhaps that made sense for someone who learned very early that strength meant holding on, enduring, and finding a way through whatever came next. Even my language about faith tended to carry some of that assumption. I needed to trust more deeply, believe more firmly, remain faithful, and somehow maintain my grip through whatever circumstances came.
But that is not actually the image Isaiah gives us. God is not standing at a distance waiting to see whether I can manage to keep hold of Him. He is holding my right hand.
I find myself lingering over that distinction now.
There were times when I held tightly to God and times when I did not know how. There were times when I trusted Him and times when I questioned Him, times when I felt courageous and others when I was deeply frightened. There were seasons when I believed I understood where He was leading me and others when I could see very little beyond whatever I needed to do next. Yet if Isaiah’s image is true, the constancy of God’s presence was never dependent upon the steadiness of my grip.
Perhaps these hands have been able to carry what they have carried, at least in part, because they were themselves being held.
And then, of course, there are the hands of Jesus.
Christianity makes the remarkable claim that the God who holds our hands chose to have human hands Himself. I wonder sometimes about the ordinariness of those hands for most of Jesus’ earthly life. They were the hands of a child and then of a carpenter, hands that worked with wood, shared meals with friends, touched people others were unwilling to touch, gathered children close, broke bread, washed His disciples’ feet, and reached toward people who had spent much of their lives being avoided.
Eventually, they were wounded.
What strikes me increasingly about the resurrection accounts is that those wounds were still visible afterward. Jesus showed His disciples His hands. Whatever resurrection means about the defeat of death and the restoration of what sin has broken, it apparently did not require erasing every visible indication of what had happened.
I find that enormously comforting.
There are forms of Christian language about healing that can sometimes make us feel that redemption ought to leave us looking untouched, as though sufficient faith or sufficient healing should eventually remove the evidence that anything terrible ever happened. But the resurrected body of Christ still bore scars. They were no longer open wounds, and they no longer represented the victory His executioners believed they had achieved, but neither had they been removed from His body.
I am careful about comparing my wounds to His, but I do wonder whether there is something here I need to understand about my own life. Healing may not require the disappearance of every scar. Perhaps some of what has happened to us can remain part of our story without remaining in control of it.
My hands have their own history of things they could not hold, too. There have been people I could not protect, relationships I could not repair by myself, losses I could not prevent, and outcomes I could not control. I have known the terrible helplessness of loving someone and realizing that there was no way for me to reach into that person’s life and make a different choice for them or create an ending I desperately wanted for both of us.
I still find that difficult.
Maybe one of the harder things I have had to learn about love is that our hands can do a great deal, but they are not sovereign. We can reach toward another person, offer what we have, comfort and serve and bless and sometimes hold someone through something unimaginably painful. But there are places our hands simply cannot reach, no matter how much we love someone.
There are places our hands simply cannot reach, no matter how much we love someone, and things that ultimately belong to God rather than to us. I suspect I have understood that theologically for most of my life. Living as though I believe it has been considerably more difficult.
For much of my life, strength had something to do with holding tightly. I held together what needed to be held together, protected what I could protect, worked harder when something was difficult, and tried not to drop whatever had been entrusted to me. There was something admirable in much of that, and I do not want to dismiss the strength it required. But gripping is not the only thing hands were made to do.
An open hand can receive something it could not take for itself. It can give without controlling what happens to the gift afterward. It can bless someone without requiring them to remain. It can release what it has no power to keep. And perhaps most importantly for me, an open hand can allow itself to be held.
I think I want to live more like that in whatever years remain to me. I don’t mean that I want to become passive about things that matter or stop fighting for people and purposes I love. I suspect there will always be some fierceness and intensity in me, and I am grateful for it. But I would like to become less convinced that loving something requires me to keep it within my grasp.
There are people and circumstances I have had to place into God’s hands because mine simply were not large enough to hold them. Sometimes I have done that willingly, and sometimes I have opened my fingers one at a time. I wish I could say surrender has always felt peaceful. More often, some of the things I have surrendered to God have been surrendered because I finally understood that holding them more tightly would not give me the power to change them.
And yet my experience of hands has not been only about releasing people. It has also been about discovering what it means for someone to remain.
For eighteen years, these hands have known what it is to reach for Macon’s hand and find it there.
That sounds like such a small thing when I write it, and perhaps that is precisely why it matters to me. So much of love is expressed through gestures too ordinary to seem significant while they are happening. A hand beside mine in the car, a hand reached for as we walk somewhere together, a hand found almost without thinking in the darkness and none of these would look particularly remarkable to anyone watching.
But I have lived long enough to understand that there is something sacred about ordinary faithfulness.
Perhaps that is another thing these hands have taught me. Love is often much less dramatic than we imagine when we are young. It makes dinner and carries bags and drives someone to the airport. It reaches across a bed in the middle of the night. It sits in waiting rooms. It wipes tears and sometimes knows enough not to wipe them because the person needs to cry. It remains beside suffering it cannot fix.
And over enough years, all of those ordinary gestures become a life.
When I look at my hands now, I see some of that life written into them. They are unmistakably the hands of a sixty-five-year-old woman, and I know that if I am fortunate enough to live many more years, they will continue to change. The skin will become thinner still. They may eventually lose some of the strength and dexterity I take for granted now. There may come a time when they cannot type as quickly, carry as much, travel as far, or do many of the things I still expect them to do without much thought.
I don’t know exactly how I will feel about that when the time comes. I am not sure I need to decide that in advance. But I do think I am beginning to understand that the value of these hands has never depended entirely upon what they could accomplish. They have been useful, certainly, and I am grateful for all they have allowed me to do. But they have also received. They have reached and been reached for. They have held and been held. They have sometimes clung too tightly and, eventually, learned to release.
Perhaps that is why I am less startled now when I look down and see the years in them. I still see the thinner skin and the veins and the small changes that tell me unmistakably that time has passed. But increasingly I also see children held and pages turned, words written and hands reached for across counseling rooms and classrooms and oceans. I see prayers offered with confidence and prayers offered with almost none. I see things I tried desperately to hold and things I eventually had to entrust to God. I see the hand of the man I love reaching back toward mine.
And somewhere beneath all of those memories is the image from Isaiah that I keep returning to: God holding my right hand.
Perhaps when I first began noticing my aging hands, I thought they were showing me primarily what time had taken from them. I am beginning to wonder whether they are showing me something else. For all the things these hands have held across sixty-five years, they have never been the hands responsible for holding my life together. I can see that more clearly now than I could when I was younger and still trying so hard to be strong enough for whatever came next.
There have been years when I held tightly to God and years when I barely knew how to reach for Him. There have been things I carried well and things I dropped, people I could help and people I could not, prayers answered in ways I recognize and others whose answers I still do not understand.
When I look at my hands now, all of that seems somehow present in them. I can see the years and some of what they have carried, but I am also beginning to see more clearly what I could not always see while I was living them.
Perhaps the most important thing about these hands was never how tightly they managed to hold on. The image I keep returning to is the one from Isaiah: my hand, with all its limits and all its history, held in the hand of God. And increasingly, I think that may have been true even during the years when I could not feel His hand there.
Run with Patience 