“Mr. Albert! Chilina’s cut her hand!” our neighbor called.
I hurried out to the gate to see what had happened. Chilina had often come to our Bible classes, and she was a special little friend.
“What happened?” I asked.
“She fell in the mud and there was a broken bottle there.”
“That’s a bad cut. I think we had better take her to the doctor.”
I quickly backed out the jeep, and Chilina and her mother climbed in. Thankfully, our doctor was at the hospital right then. He quickly took Chilina into the emergency room to clean her hand and sew it up.
“I’m not going to completely sew up the cut,” Doctor Franco said. “The palm of the hand is a bad place for a cut.”
“Why?” I asked.
“There’s a cushion of fatty tissue and not many blood vessels in the palm of the hand. It can easily get infected,” Doctor Franco explained.
Doctor Franco finished his work and told us how to care for Chilina’s hand so that it wouldn’t get infected. A few weeks later her hand had healed nicely.
Now let’s think about that hand and why God made it the way He did. The doctor had said, “Lots of fatty tissue and not many blood vessels there.” How kind of God to plan it that way! The fatty tissue makes a cushion to protect the tendons that are in your hand. The lack of blood keeps your hand from bruising easily when you use it to work. You couldn’t pound very well with a hammer if it were the other way around - not much little fatty tissue and lots of blood. God knew how much we would use our hands when He designed them.
Try it. Slap the palm of your hand down hard on a desk. Now try doing it, gently, with the other side of your hand. It hurts a lot more when you hit the back of your hand, doesn’t it? Those layers of fat protect the palm of your hand so that you can work with it. Wasn’t God wise to make your hand like that?
Now try this. Have a friend hold a pencil or a crayon behind your back so that you cannot see it. Feel it with your fingers and see if you can tell if it is the crayon or the pencil. Easy, wasn’t it? Now, close your eyes. Have the friend touch your arm lightly with either the pencil or crayon. Could you tell without looking which it was? Maybe you could, maybe not. It certainly wasn’t as easy as with your fingers. That’s because God has placed many more nerves in your hand than in the skin of your arm. God knew you would need them in your fingers to find things in the dark, to feel quickly if something is too hot or cold, and many other such things. God planned this for you - have you thanked Him for it? How often I have used my fingers day after day without ever stopping to think of God’s love in giving such special fingers to me!
But there’s even more. Both your hands and my hands are the same, with layers of fat and not much blood in the palm and lots of nerves in the fingers. Yet my fingers are also very different from yours. We each have different fingerprints - so different that fingerprints are used by the government and the police for identification. Even the twins in our family have different fingerprints. God gave us all wonderfully made hands, but He also made each one different. You are special.
And so God doesn’t just want a thousand children in heaven, He wants you. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that [put your own name here] believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). God was thinking about you before He ever made the world, and He wants you to be part of His happy family in heaven.
You can tell by looking at hands that God loves everyone, but when you look at your own specially designed fingerprints, remember that He loves you. Others have said, “The Son of God . . . loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). Can you say it too?
ML-03/19/1995