The Hand You Have Started Hiding

Six forty on a Tuesday morning, and he is at the counter of the Blue Wagon before the counter fills up. That is deliberate. At six forty there are two other men in the whole place and one of them is asleep over his eggs, and Marlene pours without asking and goes back to the till.

He drinks out of the heavy white mug with the chip on the handle. Always that one. A heavy mug rides quieter than a light one, and there is less in the cup by the time it gets to his mouth, and both of those facts he worked out on his own, in March, without ever saying them out loud to a living soul.

He lifts it with two hands. He has a whole story ready if anyone asks, about how his father drank his coffee that way and it is just a thing he picked up. Nobody has asked. He has learned that nobody asking is not the same as nobody noticing.

It began as almost nothing. A flutter in the right hand at the end of a long day, the kind of thing you blame on the day. Then it was there in the mornings too. Then it was there at the hardware counter in June, when the man behind him waited while he tried to get his signature onto the delivery slip, and the man said take your time, friend, kindly, in front of everybody, and that kindness went through him like cold water.

So he has been quietly redesigning his life ever since. He carries one bag instead of two. He lets his wife do the pouring at the table. He stopped taking the offering plate down the row at church and started sitting on the aisle so it never comes to him. He puts his right hand in his pocket when he talks to people, and if he cannot put it in his pocket he grips the back of a chair, and if there is no chair he holds his own wrist behind his back like a man at ease, and it costs him more attention than the conversation does.

And now here is the part I am not going to describe about him any further, because I do not think it is him. I think it is you, and I think you have your own version of the heavy white mug, and you do not need a stranger narrating your own kitchen back to you.

So let me just say the true thing plainly. The shaking is one problem. The hiding is a second problem, and it is a full time job, and you have been working both shifts without a single day off since it started.

Weak hands get named in the Bible, and never once as an accusation

I want to be careful with you here, because plenty of cheerful sentences have already been handed to you and most of them landed wrong.

The tremor is not the whole of it. If it were only the tremor you would have adapted by now, the way people adapt to a knee or a back. What has actually got into you is the second thing, the constant low grade calculation running underneath every ordinary hour. Can I hold that. Is that a small plate or a big one. Will they hand me the pen. Is anyone looking at my hand right now, and are they going to say something, and if they say something what will my face do.

That is exhausting in a way nobody around you can see, because the whole point of it is that nobody sees it. You have become very good at this. Being good at it is not a comfort. It means the effort has gone up and the visible evidence has gone down, and so nobody thinks to ask how heavy it is.

And underneath that there is a shame you did not order and did not earn. A shaking hand is not a moral failure and you know that in your head, and it has still somehow got itself filed next to weakness in you, next to being an old man, next to being the one people are patient with. I am not going to argue you out of that feeling. I am going to put something beside it instead, and it is not my opinion. It is written down, and it did not stay on the page: His Spirit walks a written line into a diner at six forty on a Tuesday and lays it beside a chipped white mug.

Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.Isaiah 35:3

Sit with the plain fact of that sentence for a second. Weak hands are in the book. They are in there by name, in the middle of one of the most hopeful chapters in Isaiah, and the word next to them is not repent and it is not explain yourself. The word next to them is strengthen.

God is not squeamish about a hand that will not stay still. He is not embarrassed by it, He is not waiting for it to improve before He deals with you, and He does not think less of the man holding his coffee with two hands than He does of the man holding it with one. You are not on a waiting list with Him. His Spirit is not standing off at a polite distance until the hand behaves.

Hear me on the practical side too, once, and then I will not lecture you about it again. Keep the appointment. Take what you were prescribed, exactly as it was written. Tell the specialist about the June morning at the hardware counter and the two handed mug and every other thing you have not mentioned to anybody. Going to the doctor is not a lack of faith. It has never been a lack of faith. The God who made the hand also made the people who study hands, and using them is not going behind His back.

What I am asking you to lay down is not your medical care. It is the hiding.