At our Fingertips

image from here

"Hands are so vital to creativity that I can' t understand why we value the more useless parts of our anatomy more highly." -Jane Brocket, The Gentle Arts of Domesticity

In the passage from which the above quotation was extracted, Brocket goes on to detail the many things of which her hands are capable of doing:

I like the way they knead dough, create stitches, hold yarn, thread needles, sort beads and buttons and deal with fiddly sewing machine parts. Sometimes I watch them as if they don't quite belong to me and am secretly delighted when they seem to know what to do.

Her musings are much akin to my own. For that reason, I was drawn to her words that bring more attention our hands - these so-called more "useful" but under-recognized parts of ourselves.

It echoes what I've recently read in 1 Corinthians, what Paul says about placing more value on some parts of the body than on others. "Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable," he says (v. 23). Or, (in one of my favorite Message interpretations), Eugene says:

You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When's it's a part ofyour own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn't you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

You better believe I would prefer a digestive tract that can handle what I feed my mouth over a Farrah Fawcet 'do. But, as true as this all rings to me, I still struggle with comparing myself to others in the body of Christ. If I can appreciate the less glorified parts of my own anatomy, recognizing that though they aren't highly visible, they are important, then why do I size myself up to other people who seem to be fulfilling a more necessary role in what Scriptures describe as being a figurative "body" of believers?

As I muddle my way through figuring out just what part I play, I hope that I will not fall into the temptation to see the body as anything but a whole made up of vitally different, moving, visible and invisible parts.