The Same Hands on the Wheel

The clay is centered. She can do that part. Both hands braced, elbows locked to her knees the way he showed them the first week, and the lump stops wobbling and runs true under her palms, and for a moment the whole Thursday class is quiet enough that all eight wheels can be heard humming at once.

Then he says it. Lighter.

He is standing behind her, the tutor, a big man with clay to the elbows, and he says it the way he says it every week, not unkindly. Lighter, now. Let it come up. And she does what she does every week, which is take her hands off. Not soften them. Take them off. And the bowl that had been rising true slumps sideways and folds over on itself like a tired thing, and she says a word under her breath, and the woman at the next wheel laughs in sympathy because hers went the same way in March.

He puts his hands over hers to show her, and this is the part she cannot learn. His hands are the same hands. The ones that braced the clay hard enough to stop it wobbling are the ones now barely touching it, and the clay rises between them, and it is not slack and it is not gripped. It is held. There is a pressure so light she cannot feel where it starts, and the wall of the bowl comes up thin and even under it. Firm, she can do. Firm she has been doing all her life. It is the other thing, the thing his hands are doing now, that she has never once managed to trust, and it is not because she does not know it exists. It is because every time she lets go of the grip she has nothing to replace it with, and the bowl folds.

She has been praying like that for years, she thinks, with the wheel still turning and the ruined bowl going round. Lord, hold me steady. Lord, keep me upright. Lord, do not let me fold. She has never once, that she can remember, asked Him for the other hand. She is not sure He has one. She is fairly sure that if He did, and if she leaned on it, she would go over sideways like the clay.

You know that wheel. Maybe you learned early that firm was the only kind of holding that could be trusted, and God has been the strong hand ever since, and you have been grateful for it, and you have never let Him be anything else. I am not going to take the strong hand away from you. I want to show you, from one verse, that the same hands are on the wheel.

The Rock, and the labor

Near the end of his life Moses sang a song to the whole of Israel, and in it he called God the Rock. Not once; it is the name the song keeps coming back to. The Rock, His work is perfect. The Rock that is not like our rock. It is the firm hand, and Moses is not shy about it, and neither am I. God is steady. He does not wobble under you. If firm is what you trusted Him for, that trust was placed on something true, and nothing I say next takes it away.

Now read what Moses does with the name a few lines later, because it is the whole of what I want to give you, and the Spirit of God had it written down for exactly this.

You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two verbs, one verse, one God. The Rock that bore you: the word there is the ordinary word for a father begetting a child. And then, in the same breath, the God who gave you birth: and the word there is not the same word at all. It is the word for a woman in labor, the writhing, the pains, the bringing forth. Moses puts them side by side without a seam. The Rock who fathered you is the God who labored to bring you to birth. He is not describing two Gods, or a firm one and a soft one who take turns. He is describing one, and reaching for both a father's picture and a mother's to do it, because one picture alone would not have been enough. And let me be exact here, in the same breath, because on this ground exactness is the kindness. God is neither male nor female. Scripture says plainly that He is not a man, and it never says He is a woman; when it wants to tell us what He is like it reaches, on purpose, for a father's traits and for a mother's, and it uses each picture as far as the picture goes and no further. The Rock is a picture He chose. The labor is a picture He chose. Neither one lowers the other, and a reader who came away thinking the mother had been raised by pulling the Father down would have read the verse backwards. Moses did not correct himself in the second half of the line. He completed himself.

Now let me sit in the pit with you for a moment, because it is a real one and it has a shape. Only ever being gripped is a specific tiredness. It looks like strength from the outside, and it is, and it is also a person who has never once let their weight down. You have prayed for steadiness for years and you have been given it. What you have not prayed for is the other hand, because you did not believe it was there, or you believed it was the lesser one, the one that would fold you if you leaned. I understand that. I am not going to shame it. I am going to show you it is not what the text says.

Hear this in the present tense: you have both His steadiness and His tenderness, from the same God, and neither one is a lesser side of Him. That is not my softening laid over Moses. It is written in Deuteronomy 32:18, the firm hand and the laboring one in a single verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line from a very old song into a pair of hands on a wheel.

The hands that taught a child to walk

Hosea has God remember Israel's childhood, and listen to what He remembers doing. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by their arms. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love. I bent down to them and fed them. Read those hands. Taking a toddler by the arms so he does not fall is a steadying grip; every parent knows the exact pressure of it. And bending down to feed a child, and leading with cords of kindness rather than a rope, is the other pressure, the light one. Hosea does not sort them into two Gods either. It is one pair of hands, and both things are happening in the same passage, and the God doing them says so in the first person.

You were held by both pressures before you could name either, and you are held by both now. Hosea 11 is where that stands, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a picture of a child learning to walk and puts your own weight into it.

Isaiah says it in the picture you are sitting at. But now, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Father, and potter, in one line. And a potter's hands, as you have found out on a Thursday, are not one kind of hand. They brace and they open. They center and they lift. The clay does not survive a potter who only grips, and it does not survive one who only lets go. It survives the one whose hands can do both, and Isaiah calls that potter Father without any sense that he had to choose.

You are the work of a hand that can do both, and it is one hand, and it is His. Isaiah 64:8 says so, and the same Spirit who inspired the line is the one who can make you feel the light pressure you have never let yourself feel.

Now the honest part about your mouth, because a bowl does not rise for a person who only thinks about the wheel. Jesus put the moving of a mountain into a spoken sentence, and He set the faith needed to say it far below what you would guess, so small the whole weight rests on the One being trusted and not on the strength of the trust. Your mountain is a belief that God's soft hand is His weak one, and it can be spoken to. You have the standing to speak to it, because you are in Christ and He is in you, and the authority to say what is true over your own life was given to you by Him and not earned by holding on tighter. The word puts both hands on one God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what you say further than your grip ever could.