Hands In Your Pockets

The coffee is the first problem of the day and it is only twenty past eight.

Not the coffee. The carrying of it. Nine feet of open floor between the machine and her desk, and the surface of a full cup is the most honest thing in that building. So she waits until the kitchen is empty, fills it two thirds, and takes it across with both hands wrapped around it like a woman who is cold. Which is the whole point of holding it that way. Which she has been doing since March.

Then the nine forty. She sits down before anybody else, so nobody watches her pull a chair out. There is a pen on the table in front of her and she does not touch it, because writing in front of six people is not something she does now. She has offered to type up the notes for four meetings running, and everyone thinks she is being helpful, and she is being helpful, and that is not why she offered.

Her hands stay in her coat pockets across the parking lot. They stay in her cardigan pockets on the stairs. There is a fire door on the second floor that she opens with her shoulder.

And she is good at this, which is the part nobody would guess. She has a whole repertoire: the two handed mug, the folded arms, sitting on her hands with a thoughtful look, a sudden interest in something at the bottom of her bag. Nine months in, she can get through an entire day without one person seeing, and she walks out to the car at six absolutely emptied, and not by the work. By the concealing.

Because underneath all of it is the sentence she says to herself in the elevator. If they see, they will start to wonder. And once somebody wonders, it is out, and then she is the woman whose hands shake.

That is you. Maybe it is not hands. Maybe it is your voice going somewhere strange when you have to speak up, or your chest going at a speed you cannot account for while you sit perfectly still. But you know about the pockets. You know the choreography, and how tiring it is, and how much of a day it eats.

So first, and plainly. This is not a failure of faith. A body that reacts faster than thought is not a soul with something wrong inside it, and nobody in heaven is watching your hands. What is happening to you is happening in a body, you did not choose it, and it is not a verdict on your walk with God.

Nobody in Isaiah 35 is talking to your hands

Isaiah 35 is a chapter about a road: a highway laid straight through a desert for people coming home, water breaking out where nobody had ever seen water. In the middle of the building work the prophet turns and gives an instruction.

Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you.Isaiah 35:3-4

Read who is being spoken to, because nearly everybody gets it backward. Strengthen ye the weak hands. That is not an instruction to the hands. It cannot be. It is an imperative handed to somebody else about somebody's hands. Isaiah is not leaning over a shaking man telling him to pull himself together. He has turned to the room and told the room what to do about him.

You are not the one under orders in that verse, and you never were. The weak hands of Isaiah 35:3 are not being scolded, they are being served, and the entire weight of that sentence lands on everybody in the room except the person whose hands are weak, which includes me, writing this. And it is not this page doing anything in you. It is the Holy Spirit carrying a line God said a long time ago into a body that is currently shaking.

Then verse 4 tells the room exactly what to say, which means even the words are supplied. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not. Notice the order. The fearful heart is named first and named without a trace of disgust. Nobody in that verse is surprised to find one in the room.

So you have a God who scripted the sentence He wanted spoken over a frightened person, and then had it written down in Isaiah 35:4 so that it could never be lost or improvised or softened. Be strong. Fear not. That is His word, said to you and not about you, and it is His Spirit who makes an ancient imperative land like a hand between your shoulder blades at nine forty in the morning.

Here is something about a handrail that I want you to have. A handrail is never designed around the strength of the hand that grips it. Nobody sizing a rail asks how strong the person will be. They ask what it is bolted into, how deep, and whether the fixings hold when somebody comes down those stairs at full weight with no warning. The whole calculation sits on the other side of the grip.

Your grip is not what is holding you on the stairs. It never has been. You are held by what the rail is bolted into, and Isaiah 35 says plainly what that is: your God comes, and He comes to save. That is written, it was written for people walking a road they were frightened of, and it is His Spirit who makes it possible to put weight on it with hands that are still going.

One thing said straight, because it is a duty and not a footnote. A body doing this deserves to be looked at by a doctor. Shaking hands and a chest going too fast can come from a good many places and I will not tell you which one is yours, because nobody writing on a page can know that. Get it checked. Keep taking what has been prescribed for you, and keep the appointment with whoever is helping you. That is not thin faith, that is stewardship of a body God made, and He has always worked through people with training.