The Beautiful Hands
My hands still as your head lolls. “Momma.” You jolt awake at the sound of my voice. “Oh, pasensya ka na, anak,” you apologize, your eyes both happy and half-closed. “It’s just very calming when you do my hair. You have such a gentle touch.” I blink, but you don’t see. My gloved fingers resume the slow enfolding of your every white hair in a second robe of black dye. My irises glance down at your hands. Do you not know that they are where I first found gentleness? I know that you have always had this fascination with hands: the fair, the slender, the attractive; the soft, the lovely, the beautiful. You once said that your hands were anything but. I remember the nonphysical pang that silenced my little girl mouth upon hearing that unjust judgment. You grew up under five elder brothers, all of whom had the habit of bringing their hands together and cracking their knuckles apart. No one ever told you weren’t supposed to follow their thoughtless example: not my robust pig farmer grandfather, not my sweet-faced pork seller grandmother, not the cold, ruthless nun who couldn’t reconcile giving you piano lessons and seeing her ivory keys pressed by your fingers—fingers so dirtied and darkened and battered and beaten by a hundred morning chores and a dozen afternoon jobs that the biggest bar of soap you could lay hold of could do no more than shoo away most of the scent of hard heart work. Thus your hands became stubby and short during your childhood years, and your hands remained stubby and short through your motherhood days. You and Daddy have never considered it worthwhile to conceal what you think from your sons and daughters, not for long at least. There are very few things your mouths have said that our ears haven’t heard. There are very few things your hearts have pulsed that our eyes haven’t seen. Oh, but I just couldn’t—I just couldn’t—make out what you meant when you so candidly deprecated your own hands. In truth, yours are hands so strong, so tender, so beautiful you will never know how much. Yours are my momma’s hands. Yours are hands that are swift and steadfast to serve, shying away from neither the sacrifice nor the suffering servanthood demands. You have reached down to clean up everything from soiled diapers and shattered dishware to vomit-splashed floors and crayon-scored walls. You have soaked and scrubbed and washed and dried and mended and altered and ironed and folded entire mountain ranges of clothing, so carefully that every member of your household can put on outfits that look quite fresh and yet were bought nearly ten years ago. You have, in the past two decades, crafted and cooked about twenty-one thousand nine hundred meals perfect for physical nourishment. You have flipped through and fingered over two hundred reams of lessons and essays and quizzes and tests, patient to scrawl in every appropriate correction and every due grade. Yours are hands that have borne burdens, bled love, and blessed souls, knowing full well when to hold on and when to let go. How many long nights did you sacrifice holding up your five sons and daughters when they were fragile, helpless babies? How many endless days did you endure on your knees holding close your first baby girl in tearful, heartfelt prayer as she morphed into a headstrong, rebellious teenager? How many people in great need thought of turning to you for help and were surprised to find you already reaching out to draw them in and fill them up with the unconditional love of Jesus Christ, flowing from and to and in and through you like a river wild and deep and wide and free? How many times have you been asked to acknowledge that the most loving thing you can do for another soul is not to hold on until your every bone returns to dust, but simply to let go and leave him or her to the only One Who never will? How many times have you obeyed, stood back, and watched God’s own hand, mighty to save, orchestrate in that life wonders you never could have begun to dream of? How many years have you spent dying every day by loving so many so much, ever knowing full well the cost, and yet never claiming any earthly return or reward? Yours are hands that have been permanently blood-purchased by the Hands once nail-pierced. There is no other explanation for why your hands are what they are, no other reason why they do what they do. Yours are hands that were once taken hold of and have since always taken hold of God’s only begotten Son. It is by His gentleness that you are made great; it is by His grace that you are made gentle. Anah, Hebrew word for gentleness, means “to humble oneself in order to pay attention and respond to others, to keep an eye on, to listen, to sing, to cry out for, to testify, to lift up.” Christ Jesus showed anah, and, because He did, you do, too, Momma. He humbled Himself, exchanging divine throne for human skin and “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), so that you might be freed from sin and found in Him. You do likewise, Momma, exchanging the chemist’s gold-spinning livelihood for the mother’s arrow-shaping ministry and becoming obedient to the beckon of the cross, giving up your life every heartbeat you live so that your loves might come alive, alive, alive forevermore, in Christ. He looks after you and listens to you. He sings over you and cries out for you. He testifies to His Father on your behalf when Satan snarls for your sinner’s sentence. When you have not the strength to stand, He lifts you up. You do the same, Momma. You look after us and listen to us. You sing over us and cry out for us. You are a witness of the eternal truth of the gospel, of the saving, freeing work of Jesus, when the enemy’s lies echo a long silenced condemnation and threaten to lock us up and tie us down for good. When we are too weak to lift ourselves up from the ground, you raise us up with the same grace He first gave you. Yours are hands made great by His gentleness; yours are hands made gentle by His grace. Yours are hands into which His hands have poured out unearned, unexpected, unreserved, undeserved, unreturnable, unfathomable grace: the divine ability that empowers us to do His will, the heavenly power that enables us to be who He wants us to be and to do what He wants us to do. It takes strength to be gentle. It takes grace to be strong. And for any taking of real grace, God’s grace, there must be first God’s giving, first the reaching down and opening wide of His hands majestic and mild and glorious and gentle all at once. God is the Cheerful Giver. When He gives, He lavishes, deeply and dearly delighted to pour down and fill up, to the sweet point of radiant overflow, our deepest, dearest need. “There is not a role in life that can be lived the way God wants it lived apart from enabling grace,” Pastor John Piper once preached. “Being a godly mother…is impossible without the power of grace.” Mother, teacher, father, pastor, daughter, sister, son, brother, student, disciple, musician, counselor, cook, missionary, janitor—not one ministry we can even hope to carry according to God’s calling apart from grace. For this reason the beautiful blessing softly springs up out of your mouth morning and evening like the nightingale’s timeless song: “More grace to you.” More grace to you. You speak as though you see the priceless gift has already come for us, already come to find us, already come to fill us. You speak as though you know the precious gift is still coming for us, still coming to find us, still coming to fill us. It has already. It is still. God Himself promised. “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (II Corinthians 12:9). Someone not too long ago said that His grace is our oxygen. We have no way of saving one iota for the next day; there is only enough help us live each and every moment. The sweet oxygen of our spiritual lungs is, yes, grace. But no believer alive can say that grace does not arrive like an unstoppable flood, arrest like an inescapable fire, awaken like a great and glorious Son that will never, ever set. The grace of God so moves that in the dark of our weakness we see the light of His power shining through. And what more perfect way to respond to His grace, to His charis, than with our gratitude, with our eucharisteo? When we are shone down upon, what better response are we capable of than reflecting the Light? Mrs. Ann Voskamp, insightful Canadian homeschooler not very much unlike you (of children not very much unlike yours), wrote, “The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning ‘grace.’ Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it to be gift and gave thanks. “But there is more, and I read it. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, envelopes the Greek word for grace, charis. But it also holds its derivative, the Greek word chara, meaning ‘joy.’” No wonder then. No wonder you are so full of abounding grace and amazing gratitude and astonishing joy, through the physical aching and the Value Village clothing and the visceral backbiting of people who just don’t understand. No wonder then that yours are hands that not only hold us fast in prayer, but also lift Him high in praise. Oftentimes you ask how I don’t suffer “stage fright” when I get to lead the worship in singing at church. In truth, I need only glance at you, pouring forth heart and soul, hands raised up and arms open wide, to the One Altogether Lovely, and whatever thought of fear or reserve my mind may have entertained quickly disappears. You show me what it means to hold nothing back. You show me that worship is more, so much more, than merely a Sunday morning vocal exercise. Worship is a way of living, of breathing, of being, each and every morn, each and every noon, each and every night. All this you teach me. And you teach me with your hands. So I just won’t ever make out what you meant when you so cruelly deprecated them. They are hands so strong, so tender, so beautiful you will never know how much. They are my momma’s hands, Momma. The lovely hands are the hands that only love. The beautiful hands are the hands that freely bless. I would have sorely missed that pearl of truth if not for you. Yours, Momma, are the loveliest hands. Yours, Momma, are the beautiful hands. Yours, Momma, are the only hands I aspire to have for my own someday. Our Saturday hairstyling session is wrapped up just as the clicking clock hands usher in lunchtime. Both our hands are working together now. I chop up succulent watermelon and transfer the mouth-sized cubes from chopping board to serving bowl. You finish setting out the main dish and proceed to help me finish setting up dessert. I pass you a knife with which to work, and, as you reach towards me, I freeze. I could be wrong, but it seems, in that brief moment, the hand giving the utensil and the hand receiving it almost mirror one another. I listen as you softly, joyfully begin humming a cherished melody. I watch as you deftly, effortlessly turn the blade of steel into a tool for fruit. I breathe a laugh. Yours are hands that make weapons make the nourishing produce of the earth ready for a family of seven to eat and enjoy and be sustained by. I find my voice singing along with yours—and my heart echoing back one wise king’s song for his own good and godly momma: “Give her the product of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates” (Proverbs 31:31).
These words above were written three years ago, every bit as true now as they were then. How grateful I am to you and for you, Momma, today and always.
