Open Hands

(a fortnightly service for adults with learning difficulties and their friends and carers)

All beautiful:
like tomatoes in a Spanish market,
not bland, uniform, tortured into sameshape.

     AMEN! shouts Christy-Jane as
forty pairs                            of hands
          thumbs                 raised
                  bumptogether.

Music, roughly-led, raw and real –
some strums matching written notes,
some not, just jangling with joy;
some drums chanting intricate rhythms,
some not, but banging and crashing their praise –
and Steve, butterfly of music,
reborn, bursting from chrysalis of fits and frets,
posing, spinning, singing loud and true.

Words, from mouths and signing hands,
teaching the Father's love with talk and plays
and craft and toys and slides and songs –
all hung-on, lapped up eagerly,
grasped with wide-eyed wonder.
No churchy pomp, no Sunday etiquette –
not lip-, but heart-service freely given.

Beautiful, mixed-up, multi-shapen fruit,
full-flavoured, fit for God to savour,
not bland, not uniform, passing no test;
boundlessly giving God humankind's best.