Years ago there was a very loving family that lived in a two-story house. The main public rooms were located on the bottom floor, the living room, the kitchen, the dining room and den, but the more private family rooms were located on the second floor, which housed mainly the bedrooms. There was the master bedroom, and two other rooms for their children, and one that was dedicated to the baby daughter’s room. This precious daughter was born to that family while they were living there, and as she grew older, her parents remodeled her baby-room into her very own bedroom.
One year during the months of winter, a downstairs furnace caught on fire. Thankfully most of the family was on the main floor and was able to get out safely. But the little girl, who was now two years old, was still upstairs in her bedroom playing. The father quickly grabbed the other three children and whisked them out of the house to safety, however the little girl was still in her bedroom oblivious as to what was going on. As a mother will do, she ran up the stairs that were already catching fire, slightly burning her forearms and hands, to rescue her precious daughter. When she tried to step out of the room, the flames had so engulfed the stairway that there was no way the mother and child could climb down the stairs. The only thing she could do was to wrap her young daughter in a blanket and toss her out the window into the waiting arms of her father. Seeing that there was no way down for herself, her mother climbed out of a window and began climbing down the terrace. However, by this time, even the terrace was hot and her mother had to let go, reaching out the best she could to grab hold of the lower terrace, ripping her already burnt arms and hands as she fell to the ground. From that time on, the little girl’s mother wore long white gloves over her hands and arms, hoping to hide those hideous scars from everyone who might see them, even from her family and especially from her precious little daughter.
She wore these gloves for a number of years, but one day, when the little girl was five years old, she came wandering into her mother’s room when her mother wasn’t wearing her long gloves. Her mother quickly tried to hide her arms from the seeing eyes of her little girl, but she couldn’t cover them fast enough before her little girl could see there was something wrong with her arms and hands. The little girl asked, “Mother? What happened to your hands?” Knowing now that she could no longer hide her secret, she told the little girl exactly what had happened. When she finished her story, her little daughter took her mother’s scared arms and hands into her own and said, “Oh, mother, these are the most beautiful arms and hands I have ever seen!”
There once was another mother in another time and in another place, only she had a son. He grew up to be a good son, a son who minded his mother and father, a son who learned to be a carpenter to follow in his father’s footsteps. He was a son who could do miraculous things. He could cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk. He could even heal people of all kinds of diseases, but the greatest of his feats was to raise a young man and a young daughter from the dead! No one had ever been able to do that before. And when he spoke, people gathered around him like a giant magnet, hanging on every word that he spoke. But there were those who were jealous and cursed him and tried to get the people to come away from following him so they could follow themselves insead. And finally, their jealousy and hatred led them to take this young man and lay him out on a cross, to die on a hill. Yet this young man’s mother loved him dearly. Not understanding everything he had to do, she let those who hated him, religious people of all people, she let them take his feet and his hands and nail them to that cross. And now, when you and I see paintings of that young man hanging upon his cross, we can say, “Oh, Lord, those are the most beautiful hands and feet the world has ever seen.” His name was Jesus, and what He did upon that cross was to die for your sins and mine. Let me ask you, what comes to your mind when you see those nail scarred hands and feet?
