Children’s Message--Sunday, February 15, 2008--Helping Hands

In worship today, and in Sunday School this unit, we have heard stories about Jesus as a healer. Jesus healed in all sorts of ways. Sometimes with just words--Go, your faith has healed you (Mark 10), once even with spit! (when Jesus spit into the sand and made a mud to put on a blind man’s eyes) and many times with his hands.

When we think of healing, we often think of hands. Hands that pray, hands that touch, hands that fix broken things.

I once heard the story of a minister. She worked as a chaplain at a hospital—that means that she was the hospital’s minister. Once a year, this chaplain would visit the people who worked in the hospital and pray over their hands. The people who she prayed with reported that the time of prayer with her was really special for them. And what I like about this story was that she prayed over EVERYONE’S hands. She prayed over the hands of the surgeons and the nurses—but she also prayed over the hands of the technicians in the labs, the cooks, the people who put new sheets on the beds, the people who cleaned and prepared the instruments used in surgery, the people who mopped the floors and changed the light bulbs. All of those people played a role in helping the patients get well.

I love that story because it reminds us that we can all be helpers, and that God has ways to use each of us. I also love it because it reminds us how special it can be when we pray, and how praying for things that might seem ordinary can change the way we look at things.

So let’s pray now:
Loving God
We pray for hands
For the hands you have given us
And all the things that they do.
We pray for the hands of others
And ask you to work through all of us.
Amen.