The Hands She Apologizes For

She does it before they can look.

Somebody passes her something, or she reaches for a cup, and she says, sorry about my hands, in a light voice, with the small laugh, and then whatever was going to happen happens and nobody has to be uncomfortable.

She has been doing it for about three years, which is roughly how long it has been since the thing that changed them.

It is not vanity. She would want that understood. She was never a woman who thought much about her hands one way or the other, and if you had asked her before she would have said she had ordinary hands and would have found the question odd.

It is management. She learned early on that people either look and say nothing, which is worse, or look and ask, which is worse than that on a bad day, and that a small apology at the front of the interaction takes both of those off the table.

Here is what she noticed a few weeks ago on this bench, holding a cup with both hands.

She has started doing it when there is nobody there.

Reaching for something in her own kitchen, on her own, and hearing the sentence go through her head anyway, addressed to nobody, out of pure habit.

And that stopped her, because a management strategy that runs when there is no audience has stopped being management and become something else, and she does not have a name for it.

If you have apologized for your own body lately, come and sit on this bench. Nobody is going to suggest anything.

He knows the frame, and the word is not an insult

There is a verse about God's attitude to a human body that people find surprising the first time they properly read it.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

The first thing to see is what it is not. It is not a reprimand. Read the whole psalm around it and you will find it sitting in the middle of a list of mercies, immediately after a line about a father pitying his children.

Frame is a made word. It means the thing that was formed, the structure, the physical fact of a person. And He knows it, present tense, in detail.

And then dust, which sounds like a putdown and is the opposite, because the whole point of the sentence is that He remembers. He does not forget what you are made of and then get impatient when it behaves like what it is made of. The remembering is offered as the reason for the tenderness.

You are known in the frame you actually have, and He has not forgotten what it is made of. Psalm 103:14 puts God's knowledge of the body inside a list of His mercies, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing a person can rest in rather than admire, which means the body you have been apologizing for is one He has never once been surprised by.

Nobody is owed an explanation

Now the practical part, and I want to be careful because you did not choose any of this and I am not going to add to your workload.

The apology is doing a job. You are right about that and I am not going to talk you out of a strategy that has protected you in a hundred difficult moments with people who did not know what to do with themselves. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the ground of His pity rather than as an allowance being made, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter and never the inspector.

But notice what it has quietly conceded, because that is why it followed you into an empty kitchen.

An apology assumes a fault. Every time you put it at the front of an interaction, you are agreeing, in a small way, that there is something here requiring accounting for, and after three years of agreeing with that several times a day, it has become a thing you say to yourself.

You do not owe anybody an account of your own body, and no explanation is outstanding. Psalm 139:14 says fearfully and wonderfully made, and it says it about the thing that was formed rather than about a version of it that behaves better, and it is the Holy Spirit who lives in the body you are actually sitting in, which means the account you have been offering was never owed.

And here is what this article will not do.

It will not suggest anything. Nothing to try, nothing to take, nothing to change, no view about what has happened to you or what might help, and not one word about anybody's treatment, which stays entirely between you and the people who look after you.

It will also not tell you that this happened for a reason or that you would not be who you are without it. I do not know that, nobody does, and it is not mine to say to a woman on a bench.

You have not been moved to the edge of anything by what happened to your hands. 1 Corinthians 12:22 says the members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary, and it says necessary rather than tolerated, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named in that same chapter as the one distributing to every man severally as He will, which means nothing about you has been demoted.

You are held inside a body that is not doing what it used to do, and the holding did not become conditional when it changed. Isaiah 46:4 says even to hoar hairs will I carry you, and it is His Spirit who does that carrying, which means what changed three years ago did not change who is underneath you.