Pilgr-image 04 - Blessedness

Blessed are… - Matthew 5:3-11

…the more we read the Gospels, allowing the Beatitudes to sink into our bones and be sewn into our skin, the more we realize that there’s really nowhere else to go but down. Down into the mess of real life. Down into the ugly places of the human experience. Down into the places where real people in need of God’s hope live. - Kathy Escobar

I love photographing hands.  It started with an elderly couple who were just past their 70th anniversary when the wife had to move into hospice care before dying a few weeks later.  When I visited them about a week before she died, they were sitting with him at her bedside and they were holding hands.  It was such a beautiful moment and I was grateful that they allowed me to hold that moment in a photograph (which later became the front cover of her funeral bulletin).  What I love about hands is that our hands can tell so many stories of our lives and are essential in the ways in which we live our lives. 

I thought of hands when I read Kathy Escobar's words in this chapter on the whole of the Beatitudes in Matthew.  I thought of how our hands are used as we pray, as we give, as we ask for help, as we help others, as we build, as we create, as we write, as we love, as we live.  I thought of how our hands show what we have done in the past. - callouses from heavy labor, scars from wounds along the way, strength from pulling ourselves up or lifting up others.  All of those things sunk into our bones and sewn into our skin.  All of those from the realities of real places in need of God's hope.