It Was My Hands That Went

It was not the back and it was not the knees.

You would have known what to do about those. Everybody knows what to do about those. There is a whole industry of advice for a man whose back has gone and it is aimed straight at you and you would have taken it.

It was your hands.

Forty one years of making things. Fine work, at the end, the kind that fewer people can do every year. And now they are not reliable, and you have not said the word out loud to anybody, including your wife, who knows anyway.

And here is what nobody has understood, including the people who have been kind about it.

They think you have lost a job, or a skill, or an income. You have lost the place where you were a person. Your whole way of being in a room was your hands. What you did when you were thinking, how you helped somebody, how you were useful at a family gathering, how you loved people, honestly, which was by making them things.

And this site talks about moving your body for ten minutes, and every article in it is about legs, and you have read four of them and none of them is about you.

So this one is.

Establish thou the work of our hands

There is a prayer at the end of the ninetieth psalm that asks for one specific thing twice.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. (Psalm 90:17, King James Version)

Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

He says it twice. That is not decoration, it is the way that book insists on something.

You have a psalm that asks for the work of hands to be established by somebody other than the hands, and Psalm 90:17 has never once made the establishing depend on the hands themselves. The asking is that God establish it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes something a man did stand up longer than he does.

You are able to see what that means about forty one years of work.

Every piece you made is somewhere. In houses, in use, being sat on and eaten off and looked at by people who do not know your name. That is a real fact about the world and it is not diminished by anything that happened to your hands.

And the psalm asks for exactly that: that the work be established, which means made to stand, which means it outlasts the working.

That is a prayer for a man at the end of the making rather than in the middle of it. Moses is writing about seventy years and eighty years and the days of our years being labor and sorrow. It is an old man's psalm.

You are able to have the work established without being able to do the work, and Psalm 90:17 has never once tied the standing of it to the continuing of it. The Spirit of God is the one who establishes what a man's hands did, and the psalm asks for it twice in one verse.

Hands do other things

Here is the shift, and it will take a minute because your whole framework is against it.

Your hands were for making. They were also for about six other things and you never noticed, because the making was so large that it covered them.

You have hands that did more than one job for forty one years, and Psalm 90:17 has never once reduced them to the one that has stopped. It is written establish thou the work of our hands upon us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what else was in his own hands the whole time.

Hands hold. Hands guide somebody else's hands, which is a completely different skill from making and lives in a different part of a person. Hands pass things and steady things and rest on a shoulder.

And here is the specific one, and it is the reason this article exists: hands teach.

A man who has done fine work for forty years knows things that cannot be written down. How a thing should feel. Where to hold it. What is about to go wrong, half a second before it does.

None of that is in the hands. It is in the man, and it comes out through his hands and through his mouth, and it is completely intact.

You are able to put your hands on somebody else's hands, and that has never once required your own to be steady. The Spirit of God is the one who moves what a man knows across to somebody younger, and Psalm 90:17 asks that the work be established rather than that the working continue.

Ten minutes, hands, not making anything

So here is the assignment, and the last four words of it are the whole thing.

Do something with your hands for ten minutes that is not making anything, with somebody who wants your company.

You are able to use these hands for ten minutes without producing a single object, and none of that has never once been what they were only for. It is written yea, the work of our hands establish thou it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a kitchen table with two pairs of hands.

Not making. This matters and it is the hard part.

If you try to make something, the whole thing becomes a test of the hands, and they will fail it, and you will come away with one more piece of evidence.

So it is something else. Show somebody how something is held. Put your hands over your granddaughter's and guide them. Sort something with somebody. Pass something back and forth. Play a hand game with a child, which is ridiculous and is exactly what I mean.

Ten minutes. With somebody who wants your company rather than your skill, which is every single person in your family and always has been.

You have a household that wanted your company for forty one years, and the things you made have never once been the reason. Psalm 90:17 asks that the work be established by God rather than sustained by the worker, and the Spirit of God is the one at that table with the two of you.