His Hand

A Poem and Painting for the First Week of Advent

Happy Thanksgiving! I will be sharing a painting and poem for each week of Advent (a few days early in case anyone wants use these with family, small group, or church for Advent Sundays). Below are the painting and poem for this coming weekend.

Emily Knowles, His Hand (oil on canvas, 2020). Used with permission.

His Hand

	after a painting by Emily Knowles

          Then, hovering above the formless deep,
     he plunged his hand in, shattering the seas
          with brushstrokes of volcanic flame, the leap
     of islands, dolphins, ages, symphonies
and heartbeats rising, prismed out from light
     unbreakable—his creativity
unbound, and bound, our story set to write.
 
               But we ignored him—hoarded all he gave.
               He offered us his hand—we chose the grave.
 
          And so the one who birthed the universe
     conceived to paint himself, unformed, within
          one woman’s womb—to crown and cry and nurse,
     his fingers gripping tight her tender skin—
and grow until the day his wood-worn hands
     would rebuild lives destroyed by sickness, sin,
despair, and death—helping the lowly stand.
 
               But we betrayed him—killed him like a slave.
               We pierced the hands of Love for all they gave.
 
          I wonder sometimes what his hands were like
     when Thomas touched those wounds, somehow untouched
          by even resurrection’s healing light—
     and how those hands that hued the world and clutched
his mother’s breast will always bear the scars
     of love poured out, ignored, rejected, crushed,
that we might hold the hand that holds the stars.

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About the Poem

While this poem’s scope goes far beyond Advent, the incarnation lies at its center. My following Advent newsletters will be much briefer, but this week I want to share the story of how I experienced God’s hand at work in the making of this poem.

I wrote this poem for the Art & Words Show, a collaborative art exhibit in which ten writers and ten visual artists created works inspired by each other’s art, resulting in twenty pairs of “Art & Words.”¹ I prayerfully considered the visual art options and chose Emily Knowles’ painting His Hand. “I don’t know what grabbed me about it,” I told the show’s curator, “but I will find out in time.”

I printed out the painting and returned to it over the weeks and months, wondering why God had nudged me to choose it (so I felt) and what I would write in response to this somewhat abstract painting. The deadline loomed. I prayed for help.

One day I asked my daughters what they saw in the painting. “A colorful island floating in the water,” said my then-five-year-old. “Fish swimming together,” said her seven-year-old sister. I had already felt that the hand in the painting was God’s, and my daughter’s oceanic visions washed over my imagination, calling to mind God “hovering” over the “formless… deep” in Genesis 1:2. It was then that I drafted what became the poem’s opening lines—which, through all the poem’s revisions, held onto my daughter’s “islands” and “dolphins” (okay, dolphins aren’t fish, but close enough).

As I continued to pray for inspiration and meditate on the role of God’s hands in Scripture, the poem grew from a sonnet about creation to a poem with five stanzas encompassing the creation, fall, incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—all viewed through the lens of God’s hands. (For the poetry nerd-out, see this footnote²).

I had no idea how people (especially Emily!) would react when I read this very Christian poem at this (not Christian) event. Did Emily even believe in God? Whose hand had she meant to paint? But I had done my faithful best, and all I could do was pray that God would open peoples’ hearts to receive the poem well.

When I read the poem at the show, the response was very positive—but what blew me away was what Emily told me after my reading. She told me that she too had invited God into her creative process as she painted, that she had indeed meant to paint God’s hand, and that my poem’s words and images “were the ones I was thinking about while painting and after. So many of your images were in my mind.”

I left in awe of God’s hand still at work—through Emily’s brush, my pen, and my daughter’s little fingers pointing out imagined islands—welcoming us all to join the ongoing, orchestrated creativity of the Holy Spirit. I’ll never know how God touched people through our art that day, but the experience deepened my sense of prayer’s crucial role in every stage of our artmaking—and reminded me that we do not labor alone, but as part of a community of saints who are all cared for, inspired, and guided by His hand.

May God bless you to encounter afresh the unimaginable wonder of Advent—that “the one who birthed the universe / conceived to paint himself, unformed, within / one woman’s womb” in order that we might see and touch and know the living God.

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Notes

Special thanks to Emily Knowles for her beautiful painting and for the unseen prayers and hours behind it. Thanks also to Made for PAX for originally publishing this poem.

This poem and painting will be featured in the Lausanne Movement’s 2025 Advent Devotional. Sign up to receive global Advent art in your inbox starting December 1.

I’ll be back next weekend with another poem and painting for Advent. In the meantime, feel free to check out my Advent series from last year.

Thank you so much for reading. I would love to hear any thoughts or questions!

1. My other poem in this show (which led to me being invited to participate) was “20/20,” an earlier version of my science fiction sonnet “iRemember.” The fact that “His Hand” literally wouldn’t exist if not for this unrelated and very different poem reminds me to keep faithfully and prayerfully creating, well aware that I have no idea what God’s plans might be.

2. There are three long stanzas separated by two rhyming couplets. The long stanzas’ unusual indentation matches their rhyme scheme (ABABCBC) and mimics the shape of God’s hand in the painting (from upper right to lower left). These hand-shaped, seven-line stanzas represent God’s creative work of bringing order to chaos (the number seven representing divine order and completion in Scripture). These stanzas are even meant to feel like this as the indented words are gradually reined in and start to settle against the left margin. However, God’s creative acts are twice driven back into chaos by the (highly-indented) couplets describing the fall and the crucifixion—humanity’s brief but disastrous assaults on God’s good work.