I see it every day. My fingers touch it every day. The message.
But my mind is closed, merely viewing the world through the eyes of utility, seeing only the keyboard. An instrument, a means of communication. The keys have become so familiar that they are like a part of me, space bar worn shiny on the right where my thumb always makes the separation between the words.
Lately the separations between the words have become larger. I struggle to find them, struggle to hold on to them. And they, wild, untamed things that they’ve become, slip from between my fingers, letters disappearing or substituting themselves for what I wanted to type. Mistakes. Omissions. Wrong directions and meanings.
The backspace key will soon be shinier than the space bar. I use it more than all the other keys. It is my only hope in the chaos between the words. Reading slowly, deleting, correcting as I go.
I learn to type with larger spaces. Slower keystrokes. Focusing on each letter, each word I string together into sentences. It is a deliberate act, and it comes with difficulty to me, the one who had always been so fly of finger, so quick to speak, to write, to dance with words.
Here on the keyboard, I have become Moses, slow of tongue. Slow of hand, crippled … like Jacob wrestling with God and limping ever after. I lose myself.
And so it is in this slowness, this disability, that I find the blessing … that I finally see the message, the words that creep into the spaces between the letters:
ASDFGHJKL
All Self Dedicated, For the Glory of Him, Jesus, my King and my Life.
My fingers grow still on the keys. My mind spins.
It has been there all along, this holiness under my fingers! This love song and commandment I touch every day! He wants everything of me. Even my words … words I had thought my own, to do with as I please. He, the Word Himself, wants even that.
And suddenly I don’t mind having my way with words crippled so. Not when it means that the Word finally has the space to flow in. Space that becomes shiny!
I want more of that.
It means waiting more. Listening more. Letting my fingers rest more. So I may find the message and the shining light in the spaces.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.
- John 1:1-4
