Lifting Hands That Are Not Asking

She has a good posture for prayer and she has never questioned it.

Hands up, palms cupped, slightly forward. She has done it since she was in her twenties, in a room where everybody did it, and it never occurred to her to think about what the shape means.

The shape means: I am here to be given something.

Which is fine. It is a true posture and it is not a wrong one, and there is a great deal in her life that she genuinely does not have and genuinely needs. She is not greedy. She is a woman with a mother in a home and a job that is about to change and a heart that has been tired for a while.

But she was in a service in the spring, standing at the back, and there was a moment where nobody was asking for anything at all. The band had stopped. Somebody was just saying, slowly, some true things about God. And she looked down at her own hands and found them up, cupped, forward, in exactly the same shape, and she realized she did not know what else they were for.

She put them down. And then she felt worse, because down was not right either.

She has thought about that moment quite a lot since. Not with guilt. With something closer to curiosity, which is the more useful of the two and the harder one to come by.

There is a second thing hands do in the psalms

Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name (Psalm 63:4).

Look at what the lifting is attached to in that sentence. Not to a request. To a blessing. Thus will I bless thee, and I will lift up my hands, and the two clauses are one motion.

The psalm has plenty of need in it. It opens in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, which is not a metaphor for a bad mood. But when the hands go up in verse four, they are not going up to be filled. They are going up because a man is blessing God, and lifting is what a body does when a mouth is doing that.

You have hands that were made for something besides receiving. The word puts the lifting beside the blessing and not beside the asking, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a body's posture into worship rather than performance, because Scripture says the Father seeks those who worship in spirit and in truth.

Why the shape set itself

I want to say something kind about how you got here, because you have been slightly ashamed of it since the spring and there is nothing to be ashamed of.

You learned prayer in a room where prayer was mostly asking. That is not a criticism of the room; most rooms are like that, and asking is real, and Jesus taught people to ask in plain words. You copied the posture of the people around you, which is how everybody learns everything, and nobody ever showed you a second one because most of them only had the one as well.

So your hands have exactly one setting, and it took a silence with no request in it to reveal that, and the revealing was a kindness even though it did not feel like one.

You are not greedy and your asking was never the problem. Scripture says your Father knows what things you have need of before you ask (Matthew 6:8), which settles any question about whether the asking has been welcome, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a person a second posture without shaming the first.

Lifted and empty

Here is the practical difference, and it is entirely physical, which is why it works.

Cupped hands are a container. They are shaped around what is going to be put in them, and while they are in that shape the person is, quite literally, oriented around a gap.

Open hands, lifted, palms flat or turned outward, holding nothing and shaped around nothing, are a completely different sentence. That posture does not say fill me. It says: You are worth standing here for with nothing in it for me.

You cannot think your way into that. You have to do it with a body, and then the interior catches up, which is the way God made human beings and is the reason Scripture is full of instructions about hands and knees and faces.

You are able to stand in front of God tonight with nothing to collect. The word says I will bless You while I live and lift up my hands in Your name, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an empty pair of hands into worship rather than into an awkward moment.

And I will be honest with you, because this reader has been sold things before. Doing this does not improve your prayer life as a project and it does not make the asking work better. It is not a technique for anything. What is settled is that there is a second thing your hands were made for, and you are allowed to do it tonight, in a room, with nobody watching.