handheld

My friend gives me the cross as a gift, just lays it in my palm, and it isn’t until that filling, the cool, solid weight of olive wood resting against my skin, that I realize how empty-handed I’ve been.

“I found these online,” she says, giving one to another friend too, because together, we make a cord of three. “They weren’t expensive.”

Really, she gives us the gospel to hold in our hands.

I run my thumb over its smooth curves, wondering what it is about me that I love to touch the truth, that I need to feel it with my fingers. During some of Riley’s most frustrated years, those silent seasons before she found her way to words, she could not find peace unless we filled her hands. It could be anything–toys, food, books, just as long as her hands were full. Autism left her feeling borderless in her own skin, and that filling, it helped her find her own edges. I remember the way she would look at me as her fingers curled around reality, the way she blinked in wonder as the tears stopped slicking her cheeks. I look down at the cross, feeling suddenly at peace.

When my friend says, “they weren’t expensive,” I know she means these 4-inches of olive wood, this carved, representative thing, but I whisper, oh, but it is, because I know that being my friend costs her something.

I flip the cross over in my hand, thinking that God made the killing tree a flowering shoot, thinking that I’m touching the edges of love. This cross, with its rounded ends and misshapen patibulum, is made to fit between my fingers when I clutch it in silent prayer. I like its imperfect shape because I am imperfect too–crooked and asymmetrical and yet beloved, and I like the reminder that the cross was made for me. It fits so well I don’t want to let it go.

I wonder now if it wasn’t just that we filled Riley’s hands that rescued her, that made her still and solid, but that we loved her, and the things in her hands just reminded her of the truth. Maybe she needed the tangibility of joy and contentment and story to set aside her fear, her loneliness, her pain.

I wrap my fingers around this bit of wood, but really I’m reaching for God’s hand, and the breath slowly rushing in and out becomes a prayer inclining my body toward life. You, you, you, like the beating of my heart.

“Apparently they’re handmade,” my friend says, sounding baffled that this could be true.

I can feel the carving with my thumb, how hidden valleys dip and slopes rise across the landscape, and I think about how it took a life and a death to make the cross, and then a bladed sculpting. I look at my friend, perhaps a bit in wonder over the way the things we hold in our hands can help us find integrity, realizing in the fullness of a breath that I am also handmade, carved with hills and hollows, and perfectly shaped to fit God’s hand.