Hands Full on Purpose

The hatch comes up and the noise arrives through it in one warm block. Chairs going back on a wooden floor, conversations going at every table, a child underneath one of them making a lorry noise with real commitment, and over all of it the good clatter of a room that is being fed.

She is at the pass with a ladle in her right hand and a cloth over her left shoulder. Six years she has worked this end of the counter. She knows how many portions are left in the pan by the weight of the handle. She knows which of the regulars wants the corner piece, and which one says he is not stopping and then stops for two hours, and she can tell without being told when somebody has come in who has not eaten since Thursday.

When the queue thins she does not sit down. She moves to the sink, because there is always a sink, and a sink is the one place in a crowded room where a person can be completely alone in full view of everybody.

Near the end of it, a young woman comes through the swing door with a plate in each hand, sets one down on the steel beside her and says, easy as anything, "That one is yours. Sit down."

And her hand does what her hand always does. It goes straight past the plate, to the next pan.

I know that reach. I have watched it in a great many rooms, and the first true thing to say about it is that it was never laziness and never pride. It was a way of staying in the room. If your hands are full, nobody puts anything in them. If nobody puts anything in them, nobody has to stand in front of you long enough to look.

You already know what it is. I am not going to name it and I am not going to guess at it, because it is yours, and you did not come here to have a thing described to you that you could describe far better than I could. You've carried it through rooms full of people. You've carried it while being useful, and kind, and the one everybody relies on. And somewhere in the middle of all that you got very good at keeping both hands occupied.

Nobody has ever had to catch Him up

There is a psalm people hand to each other for comfort and then read as though it were a searchlight. I want to read it with you the way it was written, which is as the most enormous relief.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.Psalm 139:1-4

Stay on that last line, because most of what I have for you is inside it.

Psalm 139 says it and the Holy Spirit makes it liveable. Not a word in my tongue. Not a word spoken, not a word written down, not a word rehearsed on the walk from the car. A word still in the tongue, still forming, not yet a sentence and quite possibly never going to become one. And He knows it altogether. Not roughly. Not the outline. Not the tidy version you would hand over if you were asked properly.

Which gives you something very plain, and I want you to have it before anything else: you've never once been in a room with God where you had to catch Him up.

Now think how much of your strength has gone into the opposite assumption. The dread is almost never what people imagine. Ask anyone who has stayed away a long time and they will say something about being told off, and that is not the whole truth. The whole truth is quieter. It is the explaining. It is the first minute, where you lay out the shape of it in words while somebody's face does whatever their face is going to do, and you watch the face while you talk, and you edit as you go so the worst of it arrives gently.

That is exhausting, in a particular way nobody gets credit for. You're tired. Not weak, not stubborn, not hard of heart. Tired, in the specific way a person gets tired when the price of every honest conversation is a performance of their own history.

Hear what Psalm 139 does to that price, with the Holy Spirit carrying it. It abolishes it. There is no first minute with God, no shape to lay out and no face to read, because He was in the room for the whole of it, and He has been acquainted with all your ways since before you had a word for any of them. What you've been getting ready to say is not news arriving at heaven. It is a thing He has held, gently, for as long as you have.

And when the letter of John says our own heart sometimes condemns us, it does not answer with a rebuke. It answers with size: God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. The One who knows all of it is bigger than the voice that has been going over it at three in the morning, and He is not that voice, and He never was.

That is why the writer of Hebrews can say what he says without a hint of nervousness. Our high priest is not somebody who cannot be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses. So come boldly, he writes, to the throne of grace, and obtain mercy. Boldly. That is not a word anybody would use of a person still working out how to phrase it.

None of this happened once to people in another century. God is meeting somebody exactly this way while you read, in an ordinary room, with the kettle on and the day half done. And it is not for the further-along version of you, or for whoever has already tidied themselves up enough to be worth meeting. It is for you, this morning, with your hands full and your explanation ready.

You have nothing to break to Him and nothing left to establish. Scripture settled that in the psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can open a hand that has held a statement for years.