The Hands That Do Not Open All the Way

They have the frame up on the porch because it is a good morning and because the light in that front room is no use to anybody after about ten.

Three of them. It is the same three it has been for a long time, minus one, and nobody mentions that and everybody thinks about it.

Hester is seventy-four. Her hands started about nine years ago and they have got on with it steadily since. They do not open all the way any more. Not closed, not useless, just short of open, and the first two fingers on the right do not do what her eye tells them to do, and that gap between what the eye asks and what the hand does is the whole difficulty.

She cannot do the fine work now. She was the best of them at the fine work for about forty years and she is not any more and she said so herself, out loud, three winters ago, before anybody had to work out how to raise it.

So she does the basting, which she can do. And she holds.

That is her job now at that frame. She holds the fabric. She takes the weight of a corner and keeps a section taut while somebody else works into it, and she can do it for a long time and she does not shake, and she is good at it in the way you are good at a thing you have paid attention to for fifty years.

And in the entirely private ledger she keeps about herself, which she has never shown to anybody and never will, Hester is now the weak one at that frame.

That is the word she uses in her own head. Not a bitter word. She is not bitter. It is a word she uses the way you use a fact about the weather: she used to do the hardest part and now she holds the cloth, and the others are kind, and the arrangement works, and she is the weak one.

This morning Nell is working into a corner Hester is holding, right at the edge, at a difficult angle, and she is talking and stitching at the same time and she is nearly at the end of a run.

And without looking up, in the middle of a sentence about somebody's grandson, she says:

Do not let go, I am nearly there.

You have a private ledger like that. Yours might not be hands. But you know the word you use about yourself in it, and you know you have never once said that word out loud to the people you use it in front of.

Paul wrote the word seem into the sentence

First Corinthians 12 is about a church, and the picture Paul uses for a church, at length and in detail, is a body. So he is arguing about people using anatomy, which means the anatomy in it holds up on its own terms.

Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read the two words in the middle before you read anything else. Seem to be.

Paul does not say the feeble members. He says the ones which seem to be feeble, which is a flag planted in the middle of the sentence saying: this appearance is an appearance, and you are about to be told that it is wrong.

You have been reading an appearance as a fact, and Scripture has already flagged it. That is the written word and not my kindness on a porch, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a chapter about a church and lays it on a quilting frame at half past nine in the morning.

And then the word he lands on. Necessary.

That word means indispensable. Not tolerated. Not accommodated. Not included because the others are good people who would not dream of leaving anybody out. Necessary, which means the work does not happen without it, which means the arrangement is not kindness at all, it is engineering.

Nell was not being gentle with you this morning. Nell was holding a needle at a bad angle at the end of a run and she needed the cloth held and she said so.

And God aims the honor at the part that lacks

Now the next two verses, because Paul is not finished and the next bit is startling.

Upon these we bestow more abundant honor. And then: God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked.

God hath tempered. That is His verb. He is the one who put it together, and the word means to blend, to mix in proportion, to bring into a working whole.

And then look where He aims the honor. To that part which lacked.

Not to the part that performs. Paul says God deliberately arranged it so that the honor goes toward the part that is short, which is the exact opposite of how every ledger anybody keeps about themselves works, including the one on that porch.

You are the part God aims the honor at, and it is already settled by His own arranging. First Corinthians 12 says God hath tempered the body together in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who gives the gifts in that chapter is the one making it a present fact in a pair of hands holding a corner of cloth.

Now let me guard this the way I would want it guarded if it were my hands.

I am not telling you nothing has changed. Something has changed and you named it yourself three winters ago, honestly, before anybody had to, and that took more than most people have. You were the best of them at the fine work and you are not now, and pretending otherwise would insult a woman who has never once lied about anything.

And I am not going to tell you your hands are secretly fine, or that this is a blessing in disguise, or any of the other things people say when they cannot bear a plain fact.

What I am telling you is what the chapter says about the word weak. It says seem. And then it says necessary. And then it says God did the arranging and pointed the honor at exactly the place you have been standing.