My hands have become my father’s hands. When I see what protrudes from my shirt sleeves I am transported to another time and place. These hands I bear are no longer the hands of my youth but are the hands of my father’s seventies.
My father was a school teacher and he should have had school teacher’s hands but for years he worked two jobs. At night he worked in the steel mills in central Pennsylvania to come home in the morning and get ready to go teach. Those years his hands were the hands of a laborer. It was his seventies hands that I now have.
If I had looked closely I think I would have seen something I missed. In Isaiah 49:16 God says to us, “See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” I wasn’t smart enough to look carefully for had I been I would have seen my name and my sisters’ names etched in the calluses forged from working eighty hours a week for years on end. Alas, how often we get smart too late.
Isaiah 45:12 God says, “It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens: I marshaled their starry hosts.”
Are we not humbled and thrilled to grasp the immensity of His grandeur and yet feel the intimacy of His care? Often in life we feel we have been wronged and no one cares. We could not be more wrong. He cares. He didn’t just write our names on His hands with ink that would fade. Oh no. He engraved our names in His hands. This Father relationship is a forever relationship.
Written by Roger Bothwell on March 5, 2015
Spring of Life, PO Box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574
rogerbothwell.org