Thine Hands Have Made Me

She tried to write it down and could not.

It was for something ordinary, a form, three lines about herself, and she sat with a pen and produced two drafts and both of them were about her work, and she deleted them both and sat there.

That was three weeks ago and it has not left her.

Because she went looking, afterwards, properly, for a sentence about herself that was not about what she produces, and she could not find one that was not either a job description or a personality quiz answer. Kind. Organized. Likes walking. None of them felt like a self, they felt like items on a list somebody else wrote.

She is thirty eight and she has started to find this frightening rather than merely interesting.

Not because she thinks she is empty. She does not believe that. It is more that she has no first sentence. There is no thing she can say about herself that goes underneath everything else and holds it up, and she has begun to notice how much weight she has been putting on the descriptions that do exist.

You may have your own form with three lines on it. Not emptiness. An absence of a first sentence, and a growing awareness of what that has been costing.

The oldest first sentence

Here is a line from a man in an extremely bad season, arguing with God, and it is one of the most physical descriptions of being made in the whole Bible.

Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about.Job 10:8

Thine hands have made me.

He is not being poetic. Earlier in the chapter he talks about being poured out like milk and curdled like cheese, which is not a lovely image and is not meant to be. He is describing being formed, physically, by hands, and the hands are God's.

And notice when he says it. He is in the worst stretch of his life. He has lost everything. He is not saying this from a comfortable place as a nice reflection; he is saying it while arguing, and it comes out as the one thing he can still assert.

That is the shape of a first sentence. It is the thing that is still true when everything describable about your circumstances has been removed.

You are made and fashioned by God's own hands, and that is a sentence that holds underneath everything else. Job 10:8 has a man asserting it in the worst season of his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman of thirty eight something to say before she says what she does.

Now let me name what has actually been happening, because you were right to find it frightening rather than interesting.

Without a first sentence, everything else has to be load bearing. Your job description has been holding the weight, and your personality descriptions, and none of them were built for it, and you can feel them flexing. That is what the fear is. It is not emptiness, it is structural.

And here is the thing about the sentence you need: you cannot compose it. That is why three weeks of looking has not produced one. A first sentence about yourself, by definition, cannot be something you assembled, because then it rests on you and you are the thing that needed holding up.

It has to be given, and it has been.

You are held by a sentence that was true before you could say anything about yourself. The written word puts the making in God's hands rather than in a person's self description, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who required you to write your own first line.

The honest half. This does not fill in the form. You will still need three lines about yourself and they will still be about your work, and that is fine and it is the right answer for a form.

There is a part only you can do and it is physical, because this needs to be somewhere other than your head. Hand flat on the chest. Say what you are, and then say what you do, in that order, so that for once the order is right.