Two Hundred Pairs of Hands

The applause started before he had finished the sentence, the way it does when a room already knows where a sentence is going.

Row four. A paper notice sheet folded down to a small hard square in one fist, folded and folded again through the whole half hour, and nobody near enough to notice. Then two hundred people getting to their feet, or near enough to two hundred, and the sound of it coming off the back wall and folding over itself so that it went on longer than the clapping did.

And one pair of hands still flat in a lap.

That is the part nobody in that room saw, and it is the part that came home with you. Not the sermon. The sound. Two hundred pairs of hands going at once, and yours on your knees, and a cold quiet arriving somewhere behind your ribs as it dawned on you that you were the only person in that building holding what you were holding.

You have not been able to sit easily through applause since. A school hall in March, plastic chairs, children finishing a song they have practiced for six weeks, everybody delighted, and your hands go down onto your knees and stay there. And you smile, so that nobody asks.

What you carried out of that room

I want to say the true thing first, because somebody should say it plainly and without a second half.

What was done to you was done. It happened. You did not misread it, you did not exaggerate it in the retelling, and this is not a story you made up. You checked that a hundred times, in the car, at the sink, at three in the morning, running it again from the beginning to see whether it still holds up. It holds up. It has held up every single time, and the checking has cost you more than anyone knows.

That is the exhaustion nobody sees. You have been the one it happened to, the only person who can say so, and the one deciding whether to believe yourself, all three at once, for a long time now. That is a whole courtroom to be running on your own with no recess. It is not a personality trait and it is not a failure of trust. It is what a person does when something real happened and the room went on applauding.

You are believed here, and believed without reopening the courtroom inside your own head. Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand. He saw it. That is settled in the written word, and it does not wait on your being able to present the case well at three in the morning. The Holy Spirit holds the truth of what happened without once asking you to prosecute it again. You can stand the court down.

There is a woman in Genesis who was used badly by people with power over her and then sent out into the desert, and God met her out there, and the name she gave Him was the God who sees me. She did not name Him the God who explains, or the God who arranges an apology. She named Him for the only thing that was actually happening: He saw her, He came out to where she was, and He spoke to her by name. He has never needed you to remember it well, or say it clearly, or produce a second person who saw. There has never been a cross examination. You have never once had to convince Him.

You have the God who sees standing exactly where the applause left you alone. She named Him out in that desert and the written word kept the name she used: Thou God seest me. The Holy Spirit makes that same witness present to you now, and He has never required a second person to come forward and confirm it before He would count it. There was no cross-examination in the desert. There is none here.

And I want to be careful here, because you have been handed cheap sentences before. Nothing in what follows asks you to say it was smaller than it was. Nothing asks you to hold both sides of it, or to imagine what he might have been going through, or to arrive at some balanced view of a thing you were not treated in a balanced way in. If there is something here that another person should be answering for, that is real, and it is not settled on this page, and none of this asks you to drop it. Nothing here comes with a date on it.

What I am asking is much narrower than that, and much more possible. There is what happened, and there is the carrying of what happened, and they are not the same object. One of them was done to you. The other one has been sitting in your arms ever since, and it was never yours.

You are free to set the carrying down without calling what happened small. Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. Sustain is a holding word, and look who it is aimed at: not the burden, you. The Holy Spirit keeps release and denial a long way apart, so the truth stays completely intact in a pair of open hands. Putting it down does not make it less true. It makes it less yours to hold up.

Let me show you where I get that, because it is not a kindness I invented. It is a picture, and it comes from a city being emptied.

Isaiah is watching a great capital pack up its gods. They are being lifted off their platforms and roped onto carts, and the animals are going under the weight of them, and the prophet says the plain thing everybody in the street can see: the gods are luggage. They cannot save the load and they cannot save themselves, and they are going out of the city on the back of a tired animal along with everyone else. Into a street full of that, God says this.

Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel, which are borne by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb: And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:3 and 4

Count the carrying words, because He does not use one and move on. Borne. Carried. Bear. Carry. Four of them in two sentences, which is how Hebrew shouts: not by raising the volume, but by saying the thing again until you cannot possibly mishear it.

And notice where He starts counting from. Not from the day you were strong enough to be useful to Him. From the belly. From the womb. From before you had hands that could hold anything at all. Whatever else was true of you in row four that morning, you were a person who has been carried since before you could carry.

You have been carried by God for far longer than you have carried this. From the belly. From the womb. Those are the written word's own starting points, and they are both a long way behind the morning in row four. The Holy Spirit brings that older, deeper keeping in underneath the weight you have been managing on your own, and it was already there. It runs further down than the wound does.

Here is the whole difference, and it is why the chapter sets those two pictures side by side. What has to be carried is not what carries you. A load has to be lifted, and lifted again, and shifted when the strap starts to slip, and checked at the door in case you put it down somewhere. That is precisely what you have been doing since that morning. You have done it carefully, you have done it accurately, and you have done it alone. It is honest work. It is also the wrong work, and it has been done by the wrong pair of hands.

In that picture there is a weary animal underneath a weight that could not save anybody. That is not what you are, and it has never once been what God thought you were. He was in that room, closer to it than you were, because you only ever had your own side of it and He had all of it. He did not put this on your back, and He has never asked you to carry Him.

You are not the tired animal under another person's wrongdoing. Isaiah sets those two pictures deliberately side by side: gods that have to be hauled out of a city on the back of a beast, and the God who has carried His people since before they could stand. The Holy Spirit puts you back on the true side of that picture. Held, not harnessed. You are the carried one, and you always were, including on the morning two hundred pairs of hands came together and yours stayed in your lap.