Faith & Fumes
It is February, and my son’s hands are not chapped.
Last week, I noticed it in the brief hug before bed that my oldest Owen still allows me, as his arms slid out of mine, that his hands felt smooth as butter. As he thundered up the stairs, I looked at my husband, already getting our post-bedtime adult snacks out of the pantry, and asked him if he’d noticed Owen’s hands. He answered me no from a muffled mouthful.
One November day back in 2016, when Owen was four, he was washing his hands before dinner and started crying like he’d been attacked. I bolted to the bathroom, expecting blood on the tiles based on the urgency of his yelling, but he very quickly and very loudly informed me that his hands stung from the soap. After a quick rinse, I inspected his hands and noticed they were red and raw and speckled and chapped. Like mine have been every winter of my adult life.
Once his stung screams subsided, I consoled him with a combination of m&ms and the assurance that my hands do the same thing in winter, and that I had solutions! In the moment, I strategically withheld the fact that the solutions involved goopy ointment and wearing knit gloves to bed because I knew such a prognosis would implode his little sensory-sensitive brain, so I just told him to just avoid using soap and hand sanitizer for a day or two.
In the coming months, he learned to manage the goop and sleep in gloves into which we’d cut finger holes so he could turn book pages at night, leaving him looking like a little hobo up in his loft bed with his star-shaped reading light. He endured this trauma for five more months until spring finally and truly arrived in Minnesota, and with it enough humidity and warmth to combat the chapped hands familiar to so many of us in the northern hemisphere.
Each year since, it has been like clockwork. Sometime a few weeks after Thanksgiving, Owen would come up to me, backs of his hands raised in the air to show me how red and raw they were.
Enter the Season of Chapped Hands: Goop and Gloves.
We’d fall into a quiet rhythm of fighting winter’s effects on our skin even as I annually apologized to him for passing on my faulty dermatological DNA. Every year. Until this one, when I realized last week that his hands were smooth …and come to think of it, mine were better too, just a few stretches of days here and there in which they’d sting.
There’s really no explaining this change. Nothing in our house or soap use or detergent choices had changed. This January was actually one of the coldest on record since 2014, so the utter lack of respect Minnesota winters has for its residents hadn’t improved. It was like an ointment-free miracle, which my pre-teen acknowledged with a “huh…weird” despite my ecstatic praise hands and sentences ending with exclamation points when I pointed this all out to him.
And sometimes it’s just like that. D-day comes, Juneteenth is recognized, the cancer goes into remission, the hands aren’t chapped.
The thorn lodged into our flesh for years suddenly falls to the ground, sometimes with a dramatic exit, sometimes almost unnoticed.
But most of the time we’re stuck in The Goopy Middle, endless days and nights of maintenance and intentionality that never bring the healing and relief we have almost stopped hoping for. And the last few years, particularly have had some real goopy, Proverbs 13:12a vibes: ”hope deferred makes the heart sick.”
I, along with the league of mothers I know both actual and digital, are running on fumes that are themselves running out. The other day I told a friend that each day, it feels like I quickly dip a cup into a shallow puddle before attempting to pour out an endless flow of care each day for my children and the people I love. It’s bad math, an unbalanced exchange…6 hours of (interrupted sleep) gets you 13 hours of parenting people who no longer nap. 1 bubble bath before bed gets you 3 meals to plan for, make, and clean up after. A 30 minute solo walk with the dog and your thoughts gets you 9 hours of managing 3 kids and their competing needs and desires for connection and relationship. It’s not enough, and it feels endless. The Goopy Middle.
I’ve been rereading the Bible this year with the help of the everyday geniuses at The Bible Project , and the other night, while dinner simmered and I did the day’s dishes to the backdrop of kids singing We Don’t Talk About Bruno in my basement, I listened to their description of blessing and curse in the Old Testament books. The word blessing connotes life, flourishing, abundance; whereas curse indicates isolation, grasping, scarcity.
Scarcity and abundance.
Chapped hands and healing.
Middle and end.
I try to imagine what it would feel like, in this middle season of motherhood, to dip my cup in a raging river of Abundant Goodness instead of into a cloudy, half-evaporated Puddle of Scarcity each day that we trudge through the Not Yet: the unhealed, the day-to-day of chapped hands and covid-related school closures that mean more time off work, and the endless calculating of how much of my child’s outburst is because they haven’t seen friends because everyone and their mother had omicron this month, and the looming presidential campaign that’s lurking ‘round the corner, and the Russian army invading Ukraine, and the immigrants freezing under bridges in a freak Texas snowstorm, and the divisions in evangelicalism, not to mention the murkiness of guiding your children emotions that you’re still trying to manage yourself, and of course, the relentlessness beast that is the laundry.
It feels almost unimaginable.
But I can imagine Jesus, sitting wellside, talking with a woman whose list of sins must have sounded as endless as he listed them, a woman stuck in the messy, goopy middle of a cycle of heartbreak and abuse and lack of options, as one by one her deepest, darkest secrets were revealed. I can imagine how unsafe and unsecure she felt, how desperately she must have been wishing for change.
And I can imagine how she felt as the conversation between this Woman of Scarcity and the Source of All things turned from His simple request for a drink into an invitation to a soul-quenching end to her deepest thirst, a promise of healing for what had been endless pain, an appeal to drink deeply and abundantly, an invitation to join Him at the Tree of Life, a la the second half of Proverbs 13:12: “but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” I can imagine how she might have struggled to believe, struggled to know even how to reach out and offer her meager cup to such an unstoppable force of water.
Maybe you are in the Goopy Middle of some heartache today, feeling trapped in a ceaseless cycle of disconnection, dysfunction, or a body that won’t heal, or a child that won’t come home. Maybe you are stuck in a moment of fear for the world in all its uncertainty. Maybe you feel the very word scarcity in your bones, and you wake each morning with the alarm bells going off because you know it’s all starting again.
But there is abundance available to us, even when the healing doesn’t come.
If we can find a moment of our day to bring our chapped hands to Jesus, to ask Him to help us in the Goopy Middle of healing not-yet-come, if we can bring to him our tiny cups of endless thirst and ask for a raging river of a drink, the abundance can find us, even in the here and now while we wait for healed hands. We can join Him in the shade of the Tree of Life, find some relief, some shelter, some mercy, even if we aren’t completely experiencing the flourishing the tree has to offer us yet.
Fellow members of The Goopy Middle, don’t forget that the God of Abundance sees and loves you and wants to smooth out your bumpy places and to be with you as you wait for an eternity of abundance.
What feels endlessly unhealed to you right now? I’d love to hear from you, to pray for you in whatever chapped-hands situation you find yourself in.
