On Sunday, April 22nd, 2000 we celebrated the baptism of our first child, Wesley Daniel Smith. It was an emotional time for us not only because Wesley was our first child but also because he was a gift from God. After the service we invited friends and family to celebrate with us. At that Sunday afternoon lunch, I shared these thoughts.
Before I knew him, his hands had reached out to me. I trusted them as a small child helped over a cool stream whose waters were too wide to cross alone. I looked to them to place me at the table before I was old enough to scamper up on my own. And I was patiently taught how to fold them in thanks to the one who is the provider of all. Those hands have consistently demonstrated the language of life, love, discipline, obedience, patience, and compassion.
Through the course of lifetime, I have seen his hands at work in the lives of so many others. Some I knew well, others were strangers, new faces on our journey. Yet together they rejoiced in the birth of a child and wept as a saint passed the worlds. They have shared out of plenty and have sacrificially given out of want. Through a lifetime I have learned to trust his hands.
Then one day I looked down and realized that his hands had become my hands – the creases in my palms, the shape of my fingertips, the veins, the knuckles, even the scars were just like his. At first I was surprised, even amused. Now I’m humbled and honored. For now that I have a son of my own, the purpose of these hands is clear. In them lay the responsibility to care for one who can not care for himself, to teach his little feet to follow the path of those who have faithfully walked before. To forge uncrossable streams and navigate insurmountable obstacles, to teach his young hands that life is a gift and to recognize truth and to see reality through the eyes of another on the journey of a lifetime.
Now with each passing day his hands are becoming more familiar to me. And each day I am reminded to use them as I have been taught, not to try to make my own way in life as if I were left to my own devices, but to faithfully serve as I have been served. To follow the well-marked path of the faithful who have gone before, their hand-prints pointing with singleness of purpose to one unique set of nail-scared hands. The hands of another son who in perfect obedience to his father reached out His hands once and for all.
