Your Hand Is Not Stuck

The jar lived on the third shelf and everybody in that family knew the rules about the jar.

It was tall and narrow at the neck, one of those old preserving jars nobody makes any more, and it held the hard little caramels the grandmother bought in the market on Fridays. The rule was one. You could reach up and take one. Everybody had done it a hundred times.

The boy took four.

He got his hand into the jar flat and easy, closed his fist around the four of them, and then discovered what four thousand children have discovered before him: a hand that goes in flat does not come out as a fist. The neck of the jar had not changed size. He pulled. He twisted. He got the whole jar off the shelf and onto the floor, still attached to his arm, and by then he was crying, and by then the aunts had arrived and were offering advice in three directions at once.

His grandmother sat down on the kitchen chair in front of him and waited until he could hear her.

"The jar has not got you," she said. "You have got you."

He did not believe her. That is the part everybody forgets when they tell this story. He genuinely did not believe her, because the pull in his arm felt exactly like a jar holding him, and a boy with a jar on his arm is not in a strong position to conduct an inquiry into what is actually happening.

She said it again. And then she just sat there.

And after a while, for no reason he could ever explain afterwards, he opened his hand.

His arm came out on the first try. Nothing else happened. Nobody gave him the caramels. He sat on his grandmother's kitchen floor with an empty hand and a jar the right way up on the tiles beside him, and the whole afternoon still in front of him, and both arms working.

What you are gripping has a grip on you

You already know your one. I do not have to name it and I am not going to try.

You thought of it about four seconds ago, and then you did the thing everybody does, which is to decide it does not count, because it is sensible, because everyone has one, because it is small, because it is not even the biggest thing you own. Notice that: it is usually not the biggest. The biggest things get held quite loosely, because they are visible and everybody is watching how we hold them. It is the small held thing that never gets looked at, the one there is a whole quiet architecture built around, the one you would explain to a friend in a slightly different voice.

And I want to say something plainly before anything else, because it decides whether you can hear the rest.

You are not on trial here. Nobody is calling you a bad person for having one. The prophets used enormous words for this condition and they used them about whole nations and about their own people, whom they loved. The word is for the arrangement, never for the reader. You are somebody with a fist closed around something, sitting on a kitchen floor, and I am sitting on the floor with you, and my hand has been in that jar too.

You are not on trial and your standing is not under review. That is not my softening: the written word says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in somebody sitting on a kitchen floor.

Here is the reversal, and it is the whole thing.

You think you are holding it. Jesus says the traffic runs the other way.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.Matthew 6:21

Read the direction of travel in that sentence. He does not say your treasure follows your heart. He says your heart follows your treasure. Whatever you have decided to keep your hand closed around, your heart is quietly relocating to be near it, a little at a time, without any announcement, and the first sign is not guilt. The first sign is what you consult first when something goes wrong. What you check before you pray. What has become the thing that tells you whether you are alright.

That is a grip. It just runs in the direction nobody looks.

And you are not owned by it. The word says you were bought with a price and you are not your own, so a thing you happen to hold has never once held the deeds to you, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this was settled long before the fist closed.

So the fist is not primarily a moral problem. It is a mobility problem. A closed hand cannot hold anything else, cannot be given anything, cannot rest palm up on your knee, cannot take hold of somebody else's. You have one hand permanently occupied, and you have been calling that security.

And your hands were made to be open. The word says He openeth His hand and satisfieth the desire of every living thing, and that is His own posture toward you, and it is the Spirit who makes a person able to mirror it without feeling that anything is being taken.

And now let me tell you what I am not saying, because this is where people brace and stop listening.

I am not telling you what to do with it. Not one word about that, not now and not further down. I do not know your situation, I have no business inside your accounts, and a stranger who tells you to move something specific is a stranger doing damage he will never see. Opening a hand is not the same act as emptying it. A hand can be open and the thing can still be sitting in the palm, resting there in the daylight, held where God and everybody can see it, available.

Open, not empty. Hold that distinction, because the counterfeit of a closed fist is not an empty hand.

Going without is not the cure either, and I want to be exact. Somebody with plenty is not further from God than somebody with nothing. Making the amount smaller is still making the amount the point, and a person who has organized their whole life around not having has their hand just as closed as the one who cannot stop counting. This is not about size, in either direction. It is about which hand your heart is living in.