Cupped Hands (Lisa)

I am learning to live with cupped hands. We have all had much sadness to carry around this past year. I want to believe the new year will be kissed with only the promise of joy and peace. That certainly is my prayer but I know, like everyone, we will mostly hold a combination of joy in one hand and a degree of sadness or some opposing emotion in the other. The older we get the more we learn to live with two palms upturned, holding joy in one, sadness in the other. We don’t just fold when life isn’t going our way, we plod along squeezing tightly to the joy as we make our life happen!

But what of the times when one palm weighs so heavy with grief or anger, fear or guilt, shame or loneliness that the opposing handful of joy just can’t hold up? What of those times, when the balance tips so heavily, when the one hand falls and joy slips through our fingers? It gives me pause to think, that the right hand will then join left just to hold all that pain. I’d like to think that a dusting veil of joy remains on fingertips and that the silent promise of His joy remains with us strengthening the left in its resiliency. Promise on fingertips allows us to hold the heavy weight of pain with cupped hands gathered together in prayer. I am learning.