(Not) Empty-Handed

Take a moment and hold out your hand in front of you. I promise I'm not going to try and tell you your future or anything, but I want you to get a good look at the palm of your hand. Some of us have little hands, some of us large hands. Some of us have soft hands, others calloused hands from a hard day's work. My hand happens to have a wrinkle in the shape of the letter "M" and a freckle in the middle that has been there ever since I can remember. Regardless of how big or small or tender or tough your hands are, there is one true statement about every hand in the world: it can only hold so much until there is no room left to hold anything else.

I'm going to lead you to my point with an extremely practical example. Lets pretend you and I are talking face to face and I ask you to offer me your hand. If I pull out a bag of pennies, I can only place so many pennies in your palm until all the free space has been filled and the excess pennies begin spilling onto the floor. If I decide I want to place quarters in your hand, I am going to have to remove some of those pennies that are already taking up space in order to make room for the new coins. 

Our lives are a lot like our open hands. We have x amount of space that we can fill as we please. If we want to fill it with a lot of work, then there might not be as much time left for family. If we want to fill it with a lot of fun, then there might not be much time left to get the job done. But what about Jesus? Where does he fit into our open hand principle? Because Jesus will take just as much of our space as we want to give him. If we want to throw out 1 square inch of distractions, Jesus will come inhabit 1 square inch. If we want to clear half the room for Jesus, Jesus will take half the room. However, regardless of how much space you decide to offer Jesus, in order to make room, something else has to go. 

Sometimes we live with tightly closed fists. After all, it is extremely uncomfortable to open our hands and let something go that we have held onto for a long time. We fear opening our hands because we are afraid that one day we will turn up completely empty-handed. On top of that, Jesus isn't a great space-sharer. The Bible tells us that we serve a jealous God. When we assign Jesus a little space between work and relationships and possessions and goals, all those things that are pressing against his space become increasingly less comfortable until we are willing to let them go to make more space for Jesus; or until we decide to remove him and allow them to take his place.

It all comes down to a decision of what you really want most out of life. It all comes down to a decision of whether or not you will open your hand, clear every inch of space to make room for Jesus, and face the fear of being left empty-handed. I'm going to let out the secret, though. When you open your hand for the sake of more of Jesus, it will never be empty. It's impossible. Never one time has God forsaken his people who abandoned everything for the sake of knowing him more deeply. Not once.

In fact, you would be in a much safer boat to go ahead and bulldoze that space you have reserved for all your hopes, dreams, goals, and ambitions, and to allow Jesus to invade that place and rebuild some of those dreams according to his plan. It would be to your benefit to release your tight grasp on your career path so that Jesus could come and straighten the way for you no matter how much of a different direction it seemed he was taking. It would not hurt you one bit to lay down every relationship in your life before the Lord and ask Jesus to resurrect them and place them back into your hands according to his plans and purposes for your life in this season. There are some things you might need to let go of in order to make more space for Jesus that you will never see again. That is okay, friend. Once that area of your life has been invaded by the presence of God, you won't feel the sting of any lack.

When the world looks at my hand, I am sure that to them it appears to be empty. When I look at my hand, I see the fullness and the richness of God's plans for my life. I keep my fingers spread open wide, not in a hurry to cling tightly to anything, but willing to allow any and every thing to pass through onto the ground trusting that Jesus will keep for me everything I have need of. It really is the only way to do life with Jesus, and I would not trade it for the false sense of security that comes from placing anything of my own design into the palm of my hand. Would you be willing to open your hand today?