I Know Exactly What To Do With My Hands

She could teach a class in it now, and that thought arrived one Tuesday and has not left.

She knows when to close her eyes and when it is better to keep them open. She knows the point in a song where the room lifts and what a person does with their hands when it happens. She knows the two seconds of silence after somebody prays that means the room agrees, and she knows how to make the sound that fills it.

None of it was cynical. She was seventeen when she came in, she knew nobody and nothing, and she learned by watching people who meant every bit of what they were doing. Copying them was not deceit. It was how a person learns a language.

But she is thirty one now, and she is completely fluent, and she cannot tell you when she last meant it.

That is the whole of it. Not doubt about God, which she does not have. Not a crisis, which she would almost welcome. Just a woman who does the shape of the thing perfectly, every week, and stands on the step afterward wondering whether anything at all happened inside her since about the age of twenty four.

If you are fluent and unsure, stand on the step with us a minute. Nothing anybody in that room does with their hands is going to be mocked here.

Fluency is not evidence of emptiness

Let us deal with the inference she has made, because it is the part doing the damage and it does not follow.

Her reasoning runs: I can do this without feeling it, therefore what I do is empty. But being able to do a thing without effort proves only that it has been done many times. A person can drive home without remembering the journey and still have wanted, the whole way, to get to their children.

There is a second thing hiding in it, and it is heavier. She has been using her own detectable feeling as the instrument for measuring her own reality, and that instrument was never accurate and gets less accurate the more anxiously it is read.

You are not empty. Nothing about being fluent in the forms has ever been evidence about what is in you. I am not saying it to reassure a woman on a step. Scripture says behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6), which puts the interest on the inward and states it as what He wants rather than what He inspects for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman who could teach a class in it.

He desires it, which means He is producing it

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that room.

Read the verb, because everything is in the verb and it is easy to read as a demand.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.Psalm 51:6

Desirest. That is want, not audit. He is not described as scanning for it and finding it absent. He is described as wanting it, which is what a person does about something they intend to have.

And then the next clause, which almost nobody quotes: in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Thou shalt make me. The work in the hidden part is His work, stated in the future, promised rather than required.

You are being worked on in the part you cannot inspect, and Scripture makes that His doing rather than your production. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman standing in a doorway at thirty one.

Nothing here says the forms are false

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page sneering at everybody who raises a hand.

The forms are not fake. The people she learned from meant it, and mean it still, and a raised hand is not a costume. Expressive worship is not the shallow end of anything, and the fact that a gesture can be learned does not make it a lie, any more than a learned word is a lie because somebody taught it to you.

And the performance trap is not hers alone. It belongs to this whole family, it always has, and a seventeen year old who learned a language by copying people is the last person in the building who should be carrying the blame for it.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the giving is stated as a fact rather than as something a person authenticates first, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a woman's ability to detect her own sincerity, who does the work in a meeting.

And if these years have cost more than the friends on that step know, if sleep has gone, if the evening has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.