Within Reach
A Good Friday reflection on love, helplessness, and what our hands can still offer
On the night before he died, Jesus knelt on the floor.
Not to pray. Not to teach. To wash feet.
He took the tired, cracked, dirty feet of his friends into his hands — these people who had argued over who was greatest, who had fallen asleep when he needed them, who would before morning deny they ever knew him — and he held them with tenderness. He poured water. He dried with a towel. Mercy flowing from his heart into his hands into the soles of their feet and every cell of their being.
Then he said:
I have set you an example. Do as I have done for you.
Not a doctrine. An example. Not something to believe. Something to do.
I have been thinking about feet this Good Friday.
About what it means to hold someone at their most vulnerable. About what happens when love becomes that specific, that close, that unhurried.
On Good Friday seven years ago I sat in a straight-backed metal chair in the corner of an ICU room, watching my wife breathe through a ventilator. The room spoke a language I did not understand. Monitors blinked numbers. Machines sighed and clicked. Clear tubes disappeared into places I could not follow.
I held her hand sometimes. Mostly I just sat there, staring at machines that were doing what I could not.
Helpless. That was the word circling my mind.
I also watched, drip by drip, a stranger’s blood flowing into her arm — infusing her with life. Someone, somewhere, had rolled up their sleeve for a person they would never meet. Their blood running now through my wife’s veins, holding her here while the rest of us waited.
I thought of Jesus the night before, holding the cup:
This is my blood, poured out for you. As often as you drink, remember me.
Giving blood to strangers to save their lives. It is, I kept thinking, the exact opposite of everything cruel and closed and fearful happening in the world.
A nurse noticed me sitting there.
She had the calm steadiness of someone who had stood in rooms like this many times before. She said gently:
Steven, I know you feel helpless. But you are not powerless.
I was not sure I believed her.
Then she handed me a small bottle of lotion. “When you feel that way,” she said, “put some lotion in your hands and rub her feet. Imagine your love reaching places the medicine cannot.”
It felt almost absurd.
But I did it. I warmed the lotion between my palms and held her foot — pale and still beneath the thin hospital blanket. I rubbed slowly. Back and forth. Heel to toe. Heel to toe. The room was quiet except for the rhythm of the ventilator.
I imagined warmth traveling where I could not go. I imagined love moving through bone and blood and cell.
I do not know if it changed anything in her body. But something shifted in mine. My breathing slowed. The panic loosened its grip. I was still sitting in a room I could not control. She was still fighting for her life. The machines were still doing their work.
And yet I was no longer entirely useless.
I had something to give. Not answers. Not outcomes. Just love within reach.
This is what Jesus was showing his friends the night before everything fell apart.
Not a theology of suffering. Not an explanation for what was coming. Just this: when everything feels beyond your reach, when the world is broken in ways you cannot fix, when you are sitting in the corner of a room you cannot control — there is still something your hands can do.
Giving blood. A smile to a stranger. A meal for someone who is hungry. Unexpected forgiveness. The gift of unhurried time. A call to someone who is lonely. Acceptance of the rejected. Tenderness for the grieving. Being a safe space for someone to be vulnerable.
Love offered within reach is still love.
There is a poem I keep returning to, by Carol Lynn Pearson, called Giving:
I love giving blood.
Sometimes I walk in off the street
when no one has even asked me
to roll up my sleeve.
I love lying on the table
watching my blood flow through the scarlet tube
to fill the little bag that bears no address.
I love the mystery of its destination.
It runs as easily to child or woman or man,
black or white,
Californian or Asian,
Methodist, Mormon, Muslim or Jew.
Rain does that. Rivers do.
I think God does.
We do not.
Our suspicious egos clot
in the journey from “us” to “them.”
So I give blood to practice flowing.
Never knowing where it’s going.
And glad.
So I give blood to practice flowing.
That line stops me every time. Because that is what Jesus was doing, kneeling on the floor with a towel and a basin. Practicing flowing. Letting love move from him toward them without condition, without guarantee, without knowing exactly where it would go or what it would do when it got there.
And then, the next day, giving everything.
Good Friday is the day we sit with what that cost.
We do not rush past it. We do not soften it. We sit with the full weight of a love that refused to stop flowing even when the world did its worst. A love that went to the most broken, forsaken place imaginable and did not turn back.
I do not fully understand Good Friday. I am not sure anyone does. But I know what I felt in that ICU room, warming lotion between my hands and holding my wife’s foot while machines breathed for her. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a stranger’s blood, drip by drip, keeping someone I loved alive.
I know what it is to be held in your most helpless, vulnerable, frightened place — and to discover that you are not alone there. That love has found a way to reach you even here.
That, I think, is what Good Friday is trying to say. Not that suffering is good. Not that the cruelty was necessary. But that there is a love that does not stop at the edge of our pain. That kneels. That pours. That flows.
Remember, Jesus said. Remember me.
How easy we forget.
Pause and Breathe
Where in your life are you confusing helplessness with powerlessness?
What is within reach right now — however small it seems?
Is there someone near you who needs the warmth of a simple, unhurried gesture — a hand, a call, a presence that simply stays?
A Blessing for Trembling Hands
May you release the weight of what you cannot fix.
May you find, in the small thing within reach, something worth offering.
May love travel further than you expect —
through bone and blood and cell,
into places the medicine cannot go.
May you practice flowing —
never knowing where it’s going,
and glad.
And when you feel most useless,
may someone hand you a small bottle of lotion
and remind you
that you are not powerless.
Thank you for this Steven. May God bless you. 🙏❤️✝️