This morning’s word is You Can Open Your Hands.
The anchor verses are Psalm 31:14-15 and Matthew 10:20.
Picture a single road into a village in the hills of northeast India. Every Sunday the black metal gates close, and the six hundred residents of Mawlynnong turn the tourists away. Shops and restaurants that serve visitors stay shut. The people who live there go to church, sit with their families, and walk the quiet paths that made the place home long before the world discovered it. They let go of one day of income and the constant flow so they can have peace.
We grip our own versions of that flow. The hurry that turns the person in front of us into the next task on the list. The fear that if we slow down or open our hands, something we built will fall apart. The quiet conviction that we are the ones who have to hold everything up.
The readings today all meet at the same place. You can open your hands.
The disciples were sent with nothing. No bag, no money, no extra shirt. Jesus told them to go anyway. They did not feel ready. Nobody ever does. The only way to learn was to move with empty hands and trust that what they needed would be given when they needed it. And later in that same sending, Jesus told them that when they were dragged in front of governors and put on trial for His name, they were not to worry about what to say. In that moment, He promised, it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Empty hands, and even an empty mouth, would be filled when the time came.
Ignatius wrote to a church that had grown suspicious of him. He did not answer with inside information or a clever defense. He said the words were not his own. They came from the Spirit. He pointed past himself so that what was said would point to GOD and not to the speaker. He kept his body as a temple by refusing to make the moment about his own wisdom or his own safety.
The voice that demands we never let go is the same old claim that we can occupy the place that belongs only to GOD. It promises control. It delivers its own fall.
You do not have to grip your life with both hands and force it forward. The hurry and the grasping are the anxious self trying to do GOD’s job. You can let go, because your times are in His hands and you are held even when you stop holding on.
We saw it this year in the young skater who walked away at sixteen after the pressure had become too much. She stepped off the ice and did not return for more than two years. She lived. She went to school. She let the thing she had gripped since childhood go. When she came back, she came back on her own terms. She skated free of the old tension. And she won the Olympic gold the way she had always wanted to skate, joyful, herself, not performing for the grip. First American woman in twenty-four years.
The village closes its gates one day a week and finds the life is still there. The skater let go of the identity that was killing her joy and found she could return from a place of freedom rather than fear. Both pictures say the same thing the readings say. The grip is not what holds you. You are already held.
I trust in you, LORD, the Psalm says. I say, you are my God. My times are in your hands. That is the word that travels from the readings into today. The hurry reveals what we trust. Being sent with empty hands teaches us where trust actually lives. And yielding, pointing past ourselves, keeps the attention on the One who holds the times.
You can open your hands. The gates can close for a day. The skates can come off for a season. The life you were afraid would fall apart if you stopped gripping it is already held.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.