WadeFiled under: Christianity, Devotion, Meditation, Religion | Tags: Jesus, Kansas, Meditation
A week ago I threw all of my worldly possessions into the back of an Isuzu Trooper and drove 1500 miles west across the Mississippi River and the Great Plains; through ghost towns and cornfields peppered with small chapels and windmills. I’ve driven this route before. The majority of it follows I-70 clear across Kansas. Kansas is the bane of my existence. I grew up in Alabama, a state that gets its fair share of bad press, but at least it has trees, mountains, lakes, and a few miles of coastline. Kansas has wheat and corn; lots of corn. I don’t mean to berate any Kansans, I am sure they are a pious, caring, hard-working lot of human beings. But, how bad must a state be if the better half of it’s name sake city lies in another state? People from Kansas have to drive to Missouri to see the Chiefs in helmets that sport a capital “K” for Kansas. Regardless, Kansas does have one redeeming quality: 400+ miles of the most mindless driving the Dwight D. Eisenhower National Interstate Highway system has to offer. This equates to roughly 7 hours of uninterrupted contemplation.
Somewhere in the maize filled desert between Hays and Colby, the shuffle feature on my iPod blessed me with Jeff Tweedy singing words that used to belong to Woodie Guthrie. He was singing of a mountain bed, made of limbs and leaves; a natural balcony, an one-way glass made for viewing humanity at a distance.
“I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands”
The thought of “hot, warm, nervous hands” captivated me. I imagined the hands of a Kansas man hammering nails into the lumber of the tiny chapels, husking corn, loading heavy bags of fertilizer into the backs of pick-up trucks, driving tractors, wiping sweat from his brow, putting food on the family table, rough-housing with his son, holding his daughter as they dance, touching the cheeks of the woman he loves, clasping tightly together in prayer. There he is, with his hands, somewhere in Kansas. And here am I, with my hands at ten and two, dreaming of a mountain bed, impatient for a glimpse of Pikes Peak as it appears on the horizon.
We like to believe we are so different from one another, walking around with suspicious eyes. But by God’s grace we almost all have hands: hot, warm, nervous hands. They build and create; they move the earth and pull from it our daily bread; they meet each other if not in prayer, in contemplation; they touch and long to touch the ones we love; they dry tears and ball up in anger. We are not as different as we may think. We have hands. We long to touch and be touched.
This is the beauty of the Incarnation. A God with hot, warm, nervous hands building and fishing, eating and drinking, praying and turning tables, reaching out and touching. It seems so clear, now, why in the Gospels, Jesus seems so fond of touching people on the face. The hand of another on one’s face is intimate and powerful. It comes from mothers, fathers, lovers, and innocently curious infants. The image of the hot, warm, nervous, callused, carpenter hands of God on my face is real, not abstract. I can close my eyes and feel it. I agree with Schaeffer, He is the God who is there, in cities and farms, in Alabama, Kansas and Colorado, in hot, warm, nervous hands.
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