Holding Hands

We like holding hands. We hold hands to cross the parking lot. We hold hands to make it down steep stretches of grass at the park. The big kids sometimes have to hold hands and sit on the couch when they have been fighting. Holding hands allows two grown-ups to swing a preschooler down the sidewalk.

On Sunday I saw someone I know to be healing from a long divorce holding hands with another someone I did not recognize. Their hands betrayed a budding romance. I casually passed, but smiled a deep smile at their backs and whispered a blessing. Holding hands is significant.

Some family friends recently and suddenly lost their mom. I was powerless to bring real comfort. The only thing I could do was pray. And so I did. I prayed over a vision of their family scooped up in God’s great hands and held close to his beating heart. And every time I thought of them, I pictured them there. Safe and warm. Free to grieve and heal and remember.

In times like those we wonder. If God is real. If he is good. If he remembers us. And since he knows we are feeble and faint he describes his relationship with us in tangible terms we can understand. So the prophet Isaiah says, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me.”

And so we hold hands. With our heavenly father and with each other.