Throw Up Your Hands -- In Prayer

I recently wrote about praying with open hands.  I have been thinking about hands a lot lately, and about gestures.  Open hands signal a lot of things.  Yes, welcome and generosity, but also we open our hands and throw them up in the air when we are in despair.  Maybe that is not such a bad thing.  Perhaps it is a form of unintentional prayer.

When we have no other recourse and we think about it, we turn to God. But when we are really without hope we may not even know where to look.  So we throw up our hands in a gesture of surrender.

Most of us don't get to this point without trying everything or getting our minds to the point of exhaustion, expecting that we have to have the answers for everything.  And then we come to the truth that for some things there are no answers.  Or more exactly, for some things only God has the answer.

Maybe this is the most open some of us will ever be.  Maybe for some of us this is a posture that God can use to teach us about life.

I often deal with people who come to me because their lives are out of control.  I want to fix it all.  I wish sometimes I had enough money to throw at the problem or I could offer them all to live in my house.  But that would not change them.  So God makes me throw up my hands with them.  And then I pray.

I do not believe God causes all of the pain in our lives.  Actually a lot of it is our own doing.  Often when those hands go up in despair it is over financial holes we have dug ourselves into.  But if we get to the point that we totally without our own answers, then maybe there is room for an answer from God.  A life changing answer that tells us life is really not about all things we think we need or even about the problems that needing too much gets us.

The one thing we need is God, because God is the source of all that gives life.  And when we give to others as God has given to us, it is not so much even because those we give to need things, it is because we want to pass on that connection to the source of life.  When people come to me for help I offer them a connection that opens the way to a larger life.


Lord, Teach us even from our despair and hopelessness and use even our emptiness to fill others.  Amen

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Copyright © 2007, The Rev. Dana Reardon. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Email her at mspastor@aol.com.



The Rev. Dana Reardon is pastor at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, Warwick, RI.  A lifelong Lutheran, she came to ordained ministry after 21 years in nursing, mostly in pediatric intensive care.  She graduated from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in 1998 and served 4 ½ years in Upstate New York before becoming a New Englander.  She is still trying to understand the accent.  While in the Upstate New York Synod she chaired the Stewardship Team.  That began her fascination with what makes stewards -- and more, what makes for generosity. She has three amazing daughters: Pastor Reardon says much of what she knows of life she learned from them.