I Learned Love with My Hands

After the stroke, I learned something about love that I had not learned in all the years before it. I understood, in a way I never had, that presence does not require words. Presence just requires showing up.

It is not advice. It is not fixing it. It is just refusing to disappear.

I learned love with my hands. Feeding. Turning. Steadying. Being in the room. The full account of those years is in my memoir. What I want to give you here is what that season taught me about what love actually is, because I had it wrong for a long time and I think most people do.

Real love does not feel like it when you are in the middle of it. It does not look like romance or fireworks. It looks like somebody showing up. Over and over and over again. On days when showing up costs something. On days when nobody would have blamed you for not showing up. It looks like doing the unglamorous thing that nobody will ever thank you for, and doing it again tomorrow. And it looks like staying in the room when the room is hard.

Now go count the feelings in that list. There are not any. Every single item is a behavior or a restraint. Be patient. Be kind. Do not envy. Do not boast. Do not insist on your own way. Bear. Believe. Hope. Endure. In the definitive chapter on love in all of Scripture, God defined it entirely by what you do and what you refuse to do. Which means love is something you can obey. And that is the best news a caregiver ever hears, because on the hardest days you will not feel anything at all, and you can still do every item on that list.

1 John 3:18 says, my little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth. In deed. That is where love lives. Not in the sentiment about it. In the hands.

And God Himself did it with hands. John 1:14 says the Word was made flesh. God did not send a message. He came in a body. In John 13, He took a towel and a basin and washed feet. He did not explain love that night. He demonstrated it, on the floor, in a posture nobody expected. And Matthew 8 says He touched the leper. He healed people with a word at a distance more than once. But this man had likely not been touched by another human being in years, and Jesus put His hand on him. That is love with hands.

Job 2:13 says his friends sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great. Seven days. Not one word. Before they ruined it by opening their mouths, those men did the single most useful thing anybody did in that entire book. They sat on the ground and shut up.

If you are sitting beside somebody in something you cannot fix, and you are tormented because you do not know what to say, hear me: you do not have to say anything. The saying is not the ministry. The sitting is.

Show up before you feel ready. Most people do not show up because they are waiting to know what to say. Come anyway. Bring food. Sit down. Say I do not know what to say and I am here.

Do the physical thing. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens. A burden is a weight, and weights are carried with hands. Drive somebody. Do their laundry. Sit in a waiting room. Bring a meal that does not require a dish to be returned.

Stay past the first two weeks. Everybody comes at the beginning. The crisis is fresh, the casseroles arrive, the calls come. And then it goes quiet. The love that changes a life is the love that is still showing up in month eight. Be a month-eight person.