Hands, open

Every year around my birthday, I usually start to get a little bit pensive, looking backward over what the year has held. If you can believe it, a year ago this week I hadn’t even heard of LCC, let alone imagined that I would now be living in Lithuania, would have visited Belarus, Latvia, Poland, would be teaching at a university … . Reading over the blog postings that are a record of this momentous, growth-filled year, it seems so obvious to me that the hand of God has been guiding and teaching me. Of course, this is true all the time, but some years I can see it more clearly than others.

One image from the past year keeps sticking in my head. It’s a picture of hands, open, and lifted up – and my heart learning how to say to God, “take whatever you want; it’s all Yours.” I’ve felt again, and again, that I am learning how to keep from grasping too tightly onto things of this world – whether that is a home, or my family, or possessions, or friendships, or idolatrous thoughts, or even my ideas of what my life should look like.

This has been an extremely painful process at times, involving a lot of tears. And I am nowhere near that point of perfect peace where I can stand before God with those open hands, untrembling and trustful. But I want to be. It is tempting, as I think back over the things that I feel I’ve let go of this past year, to become anxious. To begin to wonder if my Father will be forever taking things out of my hands without putting something back in!

But, as a friend reminded me recently, if God takes something away from us, it is because He has something better in mind. I rather snappily retorted to her, “I don’t believe that anymore.” What I meant is that I don’t think God takes away certain things in order to give us other, better things. He asks us to surrender, to stand before Him, empty-handed, until we realize that, in actuality, the better thing He wants to give us is Himself. It’s not a matter of empty hands, or filled ones. We’re all empty, naked, wretched and poor, standing and offering up hands to God, begging for something to fill them, something we can offer. And in this posture, with our arms outstretched, is when God can pick us up, pull us into His lap, and simply tell us that He is, will always be, so much more than enough.