Graven On The Palms Of His Hands

His father was not cruel. Everybody says that first and it is true.

He was a man who noticed results. He would look at a thing, and there would be a pause, and then he would say what could be better, and it was almost always right, and he never once said it unkindly.

What he did not do was the other half. Not out of coldness. It simply did not occur to him that it needed saying, because he had grown up in a house where it was not said either, and a man passes on the shape of the house he came from without ever choosing to.

So there is a face. A pause, and then an assessment. It is the face he grew up under.

His father has been dead eleven years and he loved him and he still misses him at odd moments, on a moor, for no reason.

And here is the thing he has never once said to anybody, and only recently even noticed.

When he prays, that is the face he is talking to.

Not deliberately. He would say all the right things about God's character and he would mean them. But underneath the words there is a pause, and then an assessment, and it is the same pause, and it is the same face, and it has been there for thirty years.

You may know that face. Somebody whose approval you grew up working for, whose expression you have quietly hung on God without ever deciding to.

What is cut into His hands

Here is an image, and it is one of the most physical things God ever says about Himself.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:16

Graven. Cut in. Not written, which can be wiped, and not remembered, which is a mental act. Cut into the palms, which is the one place a person looks a hundred times a day without meaning to.

And look at what is cut there. Not your results. Not a record of the last thing you produced or a running assessment of how you have been doing. You. The name. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man look at his own open palm and believe it.

Then read the line before it, because it is what this answers.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15

He picks the tenderest human bond available and then says: even that can fail, and I will not.

You are cut into the palms of God's own hands, and it is your name there rather than your results. Isaiah 49:16 makes the engraving physical and permanent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that in front of a man who has been praying to a face he grew up under.

Now let me say the careful thing, because your father was not a villain and I am not going to make him one.

He gave you real things. The eye. The standard. The instinct to look again. You are good at what you do partly because of a man who noticed what could be better, and that is a genuine inheritance and it would be a lie to pretend otherwise.

What he did not give you is not the same as something he took. He did not have it to give. The house he came from did not hand it to him either.

You are looked at by God with an expression that was never borrowed from anybody in your family. The written word cuts a name into the palms and says even a mother may forget but I will not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man a different face to pray to at fifty three.

The honest half. The face will very likely be there again next week when you pray. Thirty years of an image does not come off in an afternoon and I am not going to pretend it does.

But you can put something in front of it, deliberately, out loud, and the thing you put there is an image God chose for Himself. And you can look at your own palm while you do it, which is the point of doing it with your body, because you will look at your palm again tomorrow.