The Birthday Cards I Stopped Writing

He buys them still. That is the part nobody would guess.

There is a drawer with about nine in it, chosen properly, the kind that take a minute to pick because the picture has to be right for the person. He buys them the way he always did and then, somewhere between the shop and the kitchen table, he decides again that this year it will be a message instead.

It started with the signature. There was a card two Christmases ago where his name came out with a wobble in the middle of it that had not been there the year before, and he looked at it for a while and then wrote a second card and threw the first one away, and that was the first time.

Now it is not just cards. It is the delivery slip he asks the driver to fill in. It is the pub quiz where he stopped being the one who writes down the answers, done so smoothly that nobody at that table has any idea it was a decision. It is the fact that when the grandchildren want a drawing he says he was never any good at drawing, which is not true and never was.

Nobody has said anything. He is fairly sure his wife has noticed and is being careful. His daughter definitely has not.

And he has not been to anybody about it in eight months, and if you asked him why he would give you a practical answer about appointments and waiting, and the real answer is that he is not ready to be told.

That is you, and the drawer with nine cards in it is the whole story.

Two things at the start, and I will not move off either

The first one. Go and be seen about this.

I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice and I have no idea what is happening in your hands. But eight months of not going because you are not ready to be told is not a practical decision, it is a frightened one, and I would be failing you if I wrote two thousand warm words and let that sit. Whatever is going on, being seen about it is not a lack of faith and it never has been. There is no version of trusting God that requires a person to stay uninformed. Scripture stands under that in Isaiah 35:3, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

The second one. I am not going to promise you an outcome.

Not on this page, not in a song, not in a declaration. Nobody writing to a stranger can promise a pair of hands, and anybody who does has handed out something that was never theirs. God may do what you are asking. He may do it another way, or at a pace nobody would choose, and He may do something else entirely, and that decision is His and it will never be a report card on you. It is written, in Isaiah 35:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Those two things hold together, and between them there is a very large amount of room, and everything else on this page happens inside it.

You are welcome to bring these hands to God exactly as they are today. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth, Psalm 145:18, and in truth is the useful phrase, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man stop performing and say the actual thing.

The verse is spoken to the hands themselves

There is a line in Isaiah that is worth stopping on because of who it is addressed to.

Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.Isaiah 35:3

It is an instruction to a community about people who are struggling, and the very next verse tells them what to say: say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not.

Which means the strengthening in that passage is not only something that happens inside a body. It is something people do for each other, out loud, on purpose. Somebody is meant to be saying it to somebody.

And you have arranged the last two years so that nobody can. Not out of pride exactly, out of something more like courtesy: you have been sparing everybody the awkwardness of noticing, and the cost of that arrangement is that the very thing Scripture puts in the mouths of people around you has had nowhere to land.

You are not meant to be doing this on your own. Scripture says strengthen ye the weak hands, Isaiah 35:3, and it says it in the plural to a community rather than in the singular to the person shaking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an ordinary sentence from one person to another at the right moment.

What eight months of managing costs

Here is the thing that has actually taken more from you than the tremor has, and I want to lay it out plainly because you have never seen it as a list. Scripture settles that in Isaiah 35:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

The cards. The delivery slips. The pub quiz. The drawing. The signature at the bank that you now do very fast so it looks careless rather than shaky, which is a strategy you invented and have never told a living soul about.

Not one of those was a decision you announced. Each one was reasonable on its own day. And together they add up to a man who has been steadily removing himself from the small public moments of his own life, and doing it so competently that the people who love him have almost nothing to go on.

The tremor took your handwriting. The managing has been taking everything else.

You are not diminished by this and God has not filed you under a reduced version of yourself. Scripture says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit has never once assessed a man by whether his signature holds its line.

Ask plainly, and ask for the actual thing

When you do pray about this, if you have been, I suspect it has been general. Lord, help with the hands. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Isaiah 35:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Be specific. Not because there is a correct wording that unlocks something, because there is not, and anybody offering you one is selling a technique in place of a Father. Be specific because that is what people do when they are actually talking to somebody.

And ask for what you want. Not the polite version. In the Gospels a blind man is told by an entire road to be quiet and shouts louder, and when Jesus asks him what he wants he does not say whatever you think best. He says he wants to see.

Nobody rebukes him for that. Scripture records the question and the plain answer without a word of correction, Mark 10:51, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man asking for his hands back.