I Do Not Know What To Do With My Hands

They have put you on the good side of the table, facing the door, and you do not know what to do with your hands.

Everybody here wants you here. That is not in question and it has not been in question all evening. Somebody moved a chair before you were through the doorway. The bread came to you first, which you noticed, and which somebody did on purpose.

And here you are, with your hands.

You put them in your lap. They lasted about forty seconds there. Now they are on the table, which feels like too much table, so you take one back and leave the other, which looks strange, so you put both back. You have picked up a glass you did not want, twice, and set it down at a slightly different angle both times.

Twice already you have half stood up. Once when the pot needed carrying through and once when the young one dropped a fork, and both times three people said sit down, sit, sit, in that delighted way people say it, and you laughed and sat back down and you still do not know what to do with your hands.

Here is the thing you would not say at this table.

You have served in this room for nine years. You know where the second tray is kept. You know which of these people takes sugar and which one says he does not and then does. You have carried and poured and cleared and washed and stayed late here more times than anybody present could count, and on every one of those evenings you knew exactly, at every second, what to do with your hands.

Serving has a shape. Being served has none.

And somewhere underneath the noise, in a place it would take a long walk and a good friend to reach, there is a quieter thing that is nearer the truth of it.

If I am not carrying anything, why are they letting me sit here?

Being served is a skill, and nobody ever taught it to you

There is a line in the most quoted psalm on earth that people read as comfort and almost nobody reads as a position, which is what it actually is.

You are seated, and seated is exactly where that psalm puts a person. Psalm 23:5 has God setting the table and doing the pouring while the guest does nothing whatever except be at it, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind your chair waiting to see whether you get up and help.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.Psalm 23:5

Look at the verbs and notice, one more time, who owns them. He prepares. He anoints. The cup runs over, which is not a thing a cup manages by itself. And the man being spoken of in that verse is sitting down in the middle of it doing precisely nothing, in full view of people who would rather he were somewhere else.

You have been out for a while now, and it is harder than anybody warned you about. It is written that the table is prepared rather than earned, and the Spirit of God is not timing how quickly a rescued man learns to sit in a chair.

Because nobody tells you about the after. They tell you about the water and the arm and the getting out, and the after gets three sentences at the end. Nobody sits a man down and explains that out is a country with its own language, that he will arrive in it with no vocabulary at all, and that the first stretch of it is mostly standing in rooms trying to work out the etiquette from scratch at forty years old.

You were carried out, and carried is the accurate word, and people who have been carried come out sore. Psalm 23:5 puts no date on how long the meal runs or how soon the guest relaxes into it, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed anybody a schedule for becoming comfortable.

Now the quiet thing underneath the hands, and I am going to say it in the open, because it does not survive daylight very well. Somewhere in there is an arrangement: I am welcome because I am useful. Nobody wrote it down. Not one person at that table would agree with it for a second. But it is the arrangement that has been running underneath everything for so long that sitting still in a chair feels like defaulting on a loan.

You are at that table on exactly the same terms as everybody else at it. It is written that the cup was already running over before the guest ever sat down, and the Spirit of God attached no clause about trays.

And plainly, because the after is precisely where people go back in. If sitting in that chair has started to come with thoughts of ending your life, or of just not being here any more, then one living person hears it out loud tonight. A doctor, a friend, anybody at that table. In the United States, call or text 988 and a human being answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line does the same work. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden, least of all a man who has spent nine years carrying trays for these people. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience rather than defeat.

So what do you actually do with them. The honest answer is that they stay where they are and they are allowed to be uncomfortable, and nobody gets up, and then it happens again tomorrow, and it takes however long it takes. That is not a technique and it is not a breakthrough. It is what learning a country looks like from the inside.