My Grandmother's Hands at Twelve

He was twelve and it was a Saturday and she made him sit in the good chair, which nobody sat in.

She was not a demonstrative woman about most things. She was demonstrative about this. She put both hands on his head, which were rough because of the work she did, and she prayed in the language she prayed in, which he understood about half of, and she did not hurry.

He remembers the smell of the kitchen. He remembers that the television was on in the other room with the sound down and nobody had turned it off. He remembers that something happened in him that he did not have a word for at twelve and does not have a much better word for now.

She died when he was twenty nine.

He is forty four. He has three children of his own and a job he is good at, and he goes to the same building most weeks, and if you asked him he would say he is doing all right, and he would mostly mean it.

And he has not asked God for anything like that since.

He has thought about why and has never got all the way to the bottom of it. The nearest he can get is a picture rather than a reason. When he imagines asking, what he sees is the good chair and the two rough hands, and he understands somewhere below argument that the hands are not available, and the whole thing stops there.

The sentence he has never said, in any language, is: she was how it came, and she is gone.

You may have your own pair of hands. The person the good thing came through who is not here to do it again.

The promise was addressed past her

Look at how Peter ends the sermon at Pentecost, because he does something in one sentence that speaks directly to a man of forty four in a kitchen.

He has just told a crowd of three thousand what to do. And then, before anybody can conclude that this is a thing for the people standing in that particular street on that particular morning, he widens it deliberately.

For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.Acts 2:39

Three ranges in one line. The people present. Their children. And then, without any hedging, everybody far off.

Notice that the middle term is exactly his position. He is somebody's grandchild, standing at a distance of a generation from the person who received first, and Peter puts that case in writing before it ever came up.

You are named in the second clause of that sentence, and Acts 2:39 extends the promise to the children of the ones who were there and then further still, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sermon shouted in a crowded street and lands it on a man in his own kitchen thirty two years later.

A person is not a channel

Consider what he has quietly assumed, because it is doing all the damage and he has never examined it.

He has assumed that what happened at twelve came through her. Not that she was present for it. That she was the route, the conduit, the necessary part, and that with her gone the route is gone.

That is a natural thing to think about a woman who put both hands on a boy's head and did not hurry. It is also not what the text says anywhere. Peter does not tell that crowd that their children will receive if the parents keep praying. He says the promise is to them. It is addressed to the far off directly.

You have been treating a person as the plumbing, because the written word addresses the promise to the ones at a distance rather than routing it through anybody, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from a fact about grammar into a door a man can open at a table.

And notice who does the calling. As many as the Lord our God shall call. The initiative in that clause belongs entirely to God. Nobody has to be alive on this end to start it.

You were called by the one who is still here, and Acts 2 puts the calling in God's hands rather than in the hands of whoever prayed for you, and the same Spirit who moved on a street in Jerusalem moves in a kitchen on a Sunday.

Honoring her is not the same as needing her

Now the thing that would stop him even if he agreed with everything above, which is that asking without her feels like going around her.

It is not going around her. That has to be said carefully, because a man who honors his grandmother is not going to be argued out of it and should not be.

What she did was real and it counted. Praying over a twelve year old with both hands and no hurry is one of the finest things a person can do with a Saturday. But the honor he owes her is not the same as a dependency on her, and turning her into a required component is, if anything, a smaller thing to say about her than the truth, which is that she pointed him at God and God was the one who answered.

You are honoring her most by going to the one she was pointing at, because Acts 2:39 puts the promise in God's hands and never in the hands of the one who prays, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a disloyalty.