For most of my life, I have understood one thing with increasing certainty: stopping is not an option.

There was once a joke I heard that made me laugh.

A woman had one perfect hand and one badly disfigured. She knelt, clasped them together, and prayed, “Lord, make my hand like the other.”

When she opened her eyes, her perfect hand had become disfigured too.

For years, I understood the joke only as irony.

Recently, I looked down at my own hands — shaped now by rheumatoid arthritis — and realized

The prayer was never about the hands.

It was about the illusion that we get to choose which parts of life remain untouched.

These hands no longer resemble the ones I once relied upon.

Yet they are the same hands that have held children. They have prepared meals. They have written words and wiped tears. They have held weapons of war. They have folded in prayer.

They are not the hands I would have chosen.

But they are the hands that were given to me.

The greater prayer was never for perfect hands…

It was for the strength to live faithfully with the ones I have.

I still believe forward is the only direction worth walking