Open Hands. What does that mean?

Up until the Race I had never really heard the phrase "open hands" used that much. What I soon found out was it is a great illustration of a concept that looms over the heads of many people when it comes to planning their future and how they should do that with the Lord. 

Essentially to walk with open hands means to walk with the abandonment of your own expectations and plans and to allow the Lord to take and give things to you. It means to hold everything you have and want with your hands wide open rather than gripping tightly. It is a reminder that plans change and the Lord is the best keeper of our future. 

There is a power in freedom in God. It is a freedom I couldn't always grasp the concept of. The Lord has allowed me to experience the freedom that walking with Him entails. The ability to look at the Father and say, that I have nothing without Him. Giving Him it all, standing with a heart postured towards Him in love. 

Francis Chan articulates the idea of open hands in tandem with abandonment beautifully in his book Crazy Love,

"God would have to come through for them because they had nothing else to fall back on. This place of trust isn't a comfortable place to be; in fact, it flies in the face of everything we've been taught about proper planning. We like finding refuge in what we already have rather than in what we hope God will provide. But when Christ says to count the cost of following Him, it means we must surrender everything. It means being willing to go without an extra tunic or a place to sleep at night, and sometimes without knowing where we are going."

Trust. Trust in the Father, in His timing, in His character. That is what we step into when we step into living lives with open hands. 

I was talking with a friend the other day and she reminded me of a key part of walking with open hands that we sometimes forget. 

"Just because we are giving something to the Lord, holding it out to Him with open hands, doesn't always mean He is going to take it away. Sometimes He wants us to keep things. He wants us to have our desires when they line up with His will. He just doesn't want us to hold more tightly to other things than we hold to Him."

So often I am guilty of thinking that walking with open hands is throwing everything out the window. Yes,  He calls us to abandonment, but that doesn't mean reckless and rash decisions. It means to sit with the Father and ask Him to be in every plan and every decision. To go into each aspect of your life and ask Him where you can better glorify Him. To walk with open hands is to abandon our controlling desires. To let go of your control and hold on each object; to just allow Him to be the decision maker.