Hands

A high school student once asked if she could take a photograph of my hands for a school assignment. “An unusual request,” I remember thinking as I told her yes. Today, as I listened to Carolbeth True Trio’s amazing celebratory jazz in worship, I could picture Carolbeth’s hands dancing across the keyboard. Then I thought of the hands that cut and served bread for today’s communion and the hands which decorated the Gathering Place with fun, red balloons for our Strawberry Festival. Hands greeted people as they came to worship; hands prepared food for Urban Plunge, and hands painted prayerful art.

Hands helped offer support in many ways today. I saw it happen. So many hands participated in unseen ways, as they do every day. What do these hands speak of? Work? Prayer? Joy? Sorrow? Pain? Serving others? Peace? Love? Readers try to interpret their intricate lines, but only God truly knows the hands and of what they speak.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Your name be praised forever and ever! -from Psalm 139: