Recently, after I told my mother that my hands reminded me of hers, she said:

“You have hands that have done the work.”

We rocked in my new turquoise farmhouse chairs, discovered at a local thrift store. Our hands were in the same position, holding the rockers as we looked towards my Eastern Tennessee yard, surrounded by lush foothills. Our hands had the same short nails and gentle grip. 

Looking down, I noticed our veins, like tributaries or small rivers, etching in and out of mountainsides. I noticed how my skin, almost overnight, had revealed cells like stars, stretching over the bone. Just like her. I hear my children shriek of silly from the house inside. When did I become the mother? How has time morphed so that looking at our hands side-by-side, I see myself in hers?

Like my mother, my hands have wrung themselves, held themselves, reached out for the hands of others. Outstretched, they have praised, lifting up into the air with hesitation and then abandon. They’ve been clasped together in prayer — desperately pleading, seemingly bleeding.

For years, I struggled with addiction and untreated, undiagnosed trauma symptoms. My life was centered on how I could escape pain — through drugs, men, food, screens . . . the list goes on. God felt far away — and I, far away from Him.

We’ve both been through similar traumas, my mother and I. We’ve both lived with unhealthy patterns, both unsure that we’d ever escape the fear, the stuckness, and the prison of the mind that living in years of undiagnosed trauma symptoms can create.  

Yet, today we are here — with the same hands, we build; we love; we write; we nurture. 

We have the hands of women who have done the work to heal, both having turned to God and relied on Him. We have taken what we’ve learned from this reliance and put it all into action. Today, we live to spread a message of hope to others. 

In the classic devotional, Streams in the Desert, Lettie Cowman recounts an old fable about how birds first got their wings. The story goes something like this: 

“They [the birds] were first made without wings. Then God made the wings, set them down before the wingless birds and said to them, ‘Take up these burdens and carry them.’

[ . . . ]

For a short time the load seemed heavy and difficult to bear, but soon, as they continued to carry the burden and to fold the wings over their hearts, the wings grew attached to their little bodies. They quickly discovered how to use them and were lifted by the wings high into the air. The weights had become wings.”