Hands and Feet
When I was growing up, I spent a season exploring the Christian faith by attending a Methodist youth group. My primary motive was hanging out with my friends and getting exposure to boys who didn’t go to my high school and therefore might see me as more desirable than the ones who had been present for all phases of my awkward adolescent years. The group was made up of mostly nice kids and we got to finish out our Sunday evenings singing in unison, which to this day remains my favorite, and most missed part of attending church services. It was a good experience and I’m glad I did it. One reason is that is where I heard a phrase that has stuck with me for the last 20 some odd years.
“We are God’s hands and feet.”
The mention of God to some may seem completely normal and to others feel preachy. I know this from having attended AA meetings. Some people are completely comfortable talking about God as a omnipresent being that is an actual force in their daily lives. Some people think those people are lunatics. Personally, I’m not sure. I have a hard time imagining there is anything out there spending any amount of energy determining whether or not I’m hitting green lights on the way to my daughter’s horseback riding lessons or my son’s soccer team is going to win a game, but I’m not completely devoid of the conviction that there is something bigger than me, bigger than us, working at a level that we can’t comprehend.
I’ll just say this — that saying has just stuck around in my brain for my entire adult life and I’ve always found comfort in it, even though my belief in God has been all over the place.
I think the meaning behind the phrase is likely that we are meant to be God’s tools on Earth. We are supposed to do his/her work, just like our hands and feet do much of our body’s work. If I were getting quizzed by my youth pastor, that is the answer I would give as to the meaning of that phrase simply because I would want to answer the question correctly. But that explanation is not at all what I personally interpreted. And my personal interpretation is the one that has given me so much comfort over the years, so that is the one I’m going to attempt to explain.
When I think of the phrase, “We are God’s hands and feet”, I think about how different our hands and feet are. Both useful, but incredibly and fundamentally different. Related and purposeful, but most often operating independent of each other. I think about the entire body as representing the whole of humanity and that maybe I am just a tiny little muscle in the pinky of that body. That I have a very important function to the tendons and bones and muscles that I am attached to, which are attached to other tendons and muscles and bones, and we all work together to make up a part of a hand that is doing the job it is intended to do. I think that my function is to be the best little pinky muscle I can be. And when I think about my life that way, as an extreme extrapolation of being the “hands and feet of God”, then I don’t sink as far into the feeling that the world is better off without me. Because even though a pinky muscle on its own isn’t much, the little muscles that I’m attached to would be quite negatively impacted if I weren’t there any longer. And I couldn’t just be replaced by an elbow or some stomach lining. They need me. And that’s something.
For example, my mother will never have another daughter like me. In my case, she literally only has one daughter, but even if she had 10, we’d all be completely different.
It is my voice that will be the only one that ever sounds like me. And the words I say with that voice, and how I say them with my particular cadence and brand of humor, will only ever be mine. And the love that I have for her, which is absolutely equal in value to the love my brothers have for her, is unique because it is from me. My brothers can’t replace me if I am gone. My dad or their dog can’t replace me. I am my mother’s daughter and that is all there is to it.
This line of thinking has always been comforting to me because it helps me reset. I stop thinking of my contribution to the entire body of humanity, which is completely overwhelming and exhausting, and instead think of my unique role in the lives of the people who are attached directly to me.
What struck me today about that phrase is that not only is it important that I exist so I can make these unique contributions to the lives of folks close to me but that I don’t provide these contributions any differently when my hair is deeply conditioned.
Stay with me.
I realized that I am actually no more or less capable of doing the most important jobs in my life — the ones that really matter to me — like caring for my family, listening to my friends when they’re upset or working hard at my job when I am ten pounds heavier or ten pounds lighter. The most important functions I have on this earth are actually wholly unaffected by how I look while doing them.
We’re just so hard on ourselves about our image. Women in particular. We forget that the most valuable things we do, as part of this great body of humanity, have a million times more to do with doing our best than looking our best. What matters is the work we do, not what we look like while we’re working.
I think part of the reason we’ve gotten so hard on ourselves is because in the last 20 years or so, we’ve been bombarded by images of what the rest of body of humanity looks like all the time and we, as these little pinky muscles, were totally unprepared for that. The interesting body parts get all the attention and we have to see them paraded across Instagram or Bravo doing things that seem much bigger and much more glamorous than whatever it is we do. We think that we ought to strive to be the nose or the eye or the navel. We ought to exercise harder or moisturize differently. We think those things because those are the things we have control over. We don’t give much thought to the fact that the navel may have been born into a different part of the world, into a different family, with different genetics that made it uniquely suited to being a navel. The navel probably doesn’t think about that much either. The navel might forget that the vast majority of how it got to be a navel is from a giant network of coincidences and circumstances that it had no control over, and in a misguided attempt at being helpful ends up telling you that you can be a navel too if you can just change these things about yourself. And if you listen and you take it to heart, then you just might get distracted from the very important work of being a little pinky muscle.
When that happens, I imagine that all the little muscles around you are shouting “Would you please get your head out of your ass and focus on being a good pinky muscle? We could really use your full attention here.”
That’s what the world needs from us. They don’t need a bunch of wannabe navels, they need a solid pinky muscle.
We are God’s hands and feet.
We look different, we have different functions, we have different abilities. We are all uniquely built to do our jobs — big or small — to the best of our ability and we have to try, despite all these distractions, not to get drawn off course trying to be something or someone else.
My youth pastor died tragically young. He was an excellent human and did a fantastic job of caring for his family and the kids who showed up on Sunday nights to pass notes in the pews and loudly sing “Lord of the Dance”. Whatever little part of the body of humanity he was, he did it with gusto. He might not buy into my interpretation of the particular wisdom he shared with us one warm evening decades ago, but I like to think he’d appreciate that I remembered it all these years later.