My Hands Already Shake

Her hands shake. They shook on Tuesday in the supermarket over nothing at all, and they shake most mornings until about ten, and they shook badly two weeks ago while she was on the phone to somebody about an invoice.

This is not new and she is not frightened of it in itself. She has had it since her early twenties. She has seen her doctor about it twice, she knows what it is, she manages it, and most people who know her do not know.

What is new, in the last year or so, is that she has begun wanting something and cannot go anywhere near it.

She wants to be filled with the Holy Spirit. She has read enough to know that this is ordinary and available and not exotic, and something in her leans toward it every time it comes up.

And she cannot make herself ask, and the reason is very specific and slightly absurd and she has never said it to a human being.

If she asks, and her hands shake, she will not know which it was.

That is the whole thing. Her body is already doing the thing that other people describe as a sign, and it does it on Tuesdays in supermarkets for no reason whatsoever. So there is no test available to her. Whatever happens, she will be standing there afterward with no way to tell, and she suspects that would be worse than not asking.

And behind that is a second and colder thought. Somebody else might see it and read it as a sign, and she would have to decide whether to correct them.

The sentence, unsaid: my body has already used up the vocabulary.

You may know that bind. The instrument you would need to read this by is already broken.

He is not reading your hands

Start with the thing that will matter most, which is that God is not standing there interpreting her nervous system.

There is a line in Isaiah about the way the servant of God handles what is already damaged, and it is one of the gentlest sentences in the book.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.Isaiah 42:3

Two pictures, both of things that are barely holding. A reed already crushed. A wick that has gone to smoke and is not really burning any more. And the promise is about what He will not do to them.

He will not finish the break. He will not put the last of it out. He handles the damaged thing with a care that the text bothers to record twice in one line.

You are being handled by somebody who has already noticed what is fragile, and Isaiah 42:3 promises specific care toward what is bruised rather than a demand that it steady itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a servant and lands it on a woman whose hands shook in a supermarket on Tuesday.

Nothing about the body is being read

Consider what she has assumed, because it is understandable and it is not in any text.

She has assumed a reading is taking place. That somewhere in this transaction her body is data, and that the data will be interpreted by God, by her, or by somebody watching, and that a false reading is the risk.

There is no reading. God is not inferring anything from her hands; He knows what her hands do on Tuesdays. He is not assembling evidence about her, and He has never once in Scripture asked anybody to produce a physical response as part of receiving anything.

You have been afraid of a verdict nobody is issuing, because the written word never makes a physical response part of the transaction and never asks anybody to interpret one, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from a technicality into the moment her shoulders come down.

And notice how Isaiah describes the servant's manner in the next clause of that chapter. He does not cry out, or lift up, or make his voice heard in the street. The whole portrait is of somebody working quietly, which is the opposite of a setting where a person would be examined.

You are dealing with somebody who does not work in the street, and Isaiah 42 describes a servant who does not raise his voice or make a scene, and the same Spirit who was on Him is the one who fills.

The shaking is not the disqualification

Now the tender part, which is what she half believes about herself.

Somewhere in her there is a suspicion that a body like hers is a poor vessel. That people with steady hands are better candidates, and that hers is a system with a fault in it that makes the whole exercise unreliable.

Isaiah goes precisely the other way. The bruised reed and the smoking flax are not warned off. They are the ones the sentence is about. If there is a preference anywhere in that verse, it runs toward the fragile thing rather than away from it.

It helps to notice what a bruised reed was for. Reeds were cut and shaped into pens and into simple pipes, and a crushed one was ordinarily thrown away and replaced, because there were reeds everywhere and no reason to keep a damaged one. That is the whole force of the image. The servant in that chapter keeps the one that everybody else would discard, and the keeping is recorded as a mark of who He is rather than as an exception He is willing to make.

You were named in that verse rather than excluded by it, because Isaiah 42:3 makes the damaged thing the object of the promise rather than an exception to it, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief for a woman who has been quietly ruling herself out.