The Hand That Takes Longer

There is a jigsaw on that table that has been there since the third of the month and it is a thousand pieces of a harbor in fog, which was a bad choice and everybody agrees.

Coral is sixty-three. The stroke was four years ago in February and she came out of it better than anybody dared hope, and she would be the first to tell you so, and she does tell people so, and she means it.

Her left hand works. That is the honest report. It works. It is just slow.

It takes longer to do everything. It takes longer to find a piece, longer to turn it round, longer to set it down where she means to set it down, and the difference between her two hands is somewhere between two and four seconds on every single action, which is nothing, and which over four years is a very great deal.

They started the jigsaws because a physical therapist suggested it in the first year. Nobody has thought about that in a long time. Now it is just a thing she and Nia do.

Nia is seven and has a system. She did not invent it deliberately, she just fell into it, the way children do. Nia finds the pieces. She sorts by color into little piles that make sense to her and no one else. She holds them up and says things about them. And then she passes them across the table, one at a time, and her grandmother puts them in.

Coral has an assessment of this arrangement that she has never said out loud to anybody, and it goes: the child is being kind. The child has worked out that Grandma is slow and has organized the game so that Grandma can keep up.

That is what she thinks is happening, and she is grateful for it and it also costs her something every single afternoon.

Today Nia is holding a piece of gray up against a piece of gray and she says, without any weight at all, in the middle of a sentence about something else entirely:

I find them and you put them in. That is how we do it.

And she goes back to the grays.

Coral sits there with her right hand on the table and her left one in her lap. Because she has been calling herself the slow one for four years, and the person on the other side of that table has never once used the word slow. She has been describing an arrangement, and in her description Coral is the one who puts them in.

You have that assessment. Yours might not be a hand and it might not be four years. But you know the quiet judgment you have passed on your own body, and you have never once checked it against what anybody else in the room actually thinks.

The verse is in the present tense

Psalm 139 is one that gets read at the beginning of a life, and that is a shame, because it was written by a grown man with a complicated history who is looking at himself as he currently is.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14

I am.

Not I was. Not I was, once, before the February that changed things. David is not describing a photograph of himself at twenty. He is a man in the middle of his own life with everything that has happened to him already having happened, saying I am, in the present tense, about the body he is standing in that day.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made, present tense, in the body you are actually in as you read this. That is the written word and not my kindness across a table, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm written by a man with a past and lays it on a jigsaw of a harbor in fog.

And then the direction the sentence points. Marvelous are thy works. The praise in that verse is not aimed at the body. It is aimed at the maker of it, which is exactly why nothing in the verse depends on the body performing. A made thing is not praised for what it can do this year. It is evidence about somebody else.

All my members were written

Now stay in that psalm three verses further on, because David says something that is almost too much.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

All my members were written.

That word again, the anatomical one, the one that means limbs and parts. And David says they are written in a book, all of them, and the writing happened before there were any of them at all.

Not the fast ones. Not the ones that came through the last four years unchanged. All of them.

You have members written in His book, all of them, and it is already settled, and it was settled before any of them existed. Psalm 139 says all my members were written in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who moved David to write them is the one making it a present fact in a woman with one hand in her lap.

Now let me guard this carefully, because this is the category where careless language does the most damage and I will not do it to you.

I am not telling you that the difference is not real, or that you should feel differently about a slow hand than you do. It is slower. It costs you time and it costs you something else that is harder to name, and pretending otherwise would insult you.

I am not promising you anything about that hand either. Nothing in this message is a claim about what happens next with your body. That is God's business, in His way and in His time, and anybody who tells you otherwise in order to make you feel better this afternoon has made you a promise nobody authorized them to make.

And I am not asking you to be grateful for the stroke. Psalm 139 does not do that and neither will I.

What I am telling you is that the assessment you have been carrying, the one where this body is the part God has no use for, is not supported by a single line of that psalm, and it was not written by God, and it has been running quietly under four years of afternoons.