Rues of Roo

There’s something about worshipping God that just seems so surreal. I don’t think people who don’t go to church ‘understand’ it, and sometimes if you take a step back and look at what people do, it really is ratherstrange. People meet together, stand in a hall, sing songs written about God and then lift their hands up.

The first time I saw the whole ‘hands raised’ thing I was pretty young, and to be honest I don’t really remember thinking much of it. But as time progressed I saw it from a different angle, from the angle of those who didn’t always agree with it, and those who sort of just did it, well, because everyone else was.

So I always wondered about this hand-raising issue. Like, what gives? Does it make you closer to God or something? Does it ‘enhance’ your spirituality? Did it make you more holy? Make you belong?

And yet after a while you suddenly realise why you do it, and why others do it, and I guess the example that so many use are football matches. When people just stand there with their hands lifted high in support of their team. It’s like some kind of natural human reaction to worship, to support, to acknowledge something. The act of raising your hands, it’s like a means of identity, of reaching out, of worship, of sacrifice, of offering. It’s so in built into us, that your hands act as a means of indicating your purposes and intent. When you talk you move your hands to help you communicate, you use them to describe things, to point things out, to bring people together, to push people apart. Your hands are the things you use the most in your everyday life, you use them to do things for yourself, for others, to work, to play.

So it almost seems obvious that if you were to want to worship something, other than using your voice to communicate these ideas, you would use your hands also, to show worship, to communicate worship, to indicate your wants and desire to surrender, to offer.

So it is that images of hands raised high just evoke such emotions of worship and sacrifice and longing; imagery and metaphors that just seem to fit so perfectly with the worship of one God, one King, one Saviour.

(photos from my church youth service)