GLOBAL VOICES
Whose Hand Was It Steve Dresselhaus When I was in early high school, my dad and I wanted to make a SCUBA dive on a shipwreck off the coast of Venezuela. My parents were missionaries, the kind of loving and gentle people who give missionaries a good name. It was during Semana Santa, Easter week, the time when everyone who could spent the week camping on the wonderful Caribbean shores of Venezuela. By the time we arrived at the beach community, all the boats were already chartered. Someone happened to remember an old fisherman who had a boat. We found our way to his hovel, a rickety shack built on stilts over a muddy swamp. To get to his house we walked along a precarious wooden dock which woozily swayed under each step, threatening to hurl us into the muck below. The dancing dock announced our approach long before we knocked on the door of the hut. The old fisherman came out to meet us. For me, growing up in Venezuela, unpleasant sights were not rare. The fisherman that emerged from his hovel was one more of those unpleasant sights. Ragged dirty clothes clung to him. Long, tangled, greasy hair hung down both sides of his head. The worst part was his skin. Some disease had ravaged his skin leaving it discolored, torn and scabby. Growing up in Sunday School and hearing all the Bible stories had given me an idea of what leprosy must look like—this man fit my image of that dread disease. My dad and the fisherman talked for a few minutes and then agreed on the price to charter the boat for the day. My dad then held out his hand. The fisherman paused, looked at my dad and then slowly extended his own hand. As their hands met and for those few seconds they touched, I looked at the disfigured face before me and saw in those eyes a sight I will never forget should I live a million years. For the first time in what must have seemed like a miserable eternity to the old man, somebody touched him. He felt skin other than his own rotting exterior. I can only describe what I saw in the old man’s eyes as a kaleidoscope of emotions—delight, joy, sorrow, yearning, desperation, unresolved grief. No one had touched that man for years as he dwelt in isolation, in his lonely shack above the putrid backwater of the swamp in a cruel, involuntary social distancing caused by universal rejection. Yet my dad touched him. My dad, a man who loved Jesus and who loved the people Jesus loved, demonstrated the very thing Jesus would have done had he been with us on the rickety dock. That emotion-filled fisherman must have wondered who touched him: a man named Elton or Jesus. Maybe it was Jesus touching the man through the hand of a man named Elton. Did my dad take a foolish risk? I don’t know that he even thought about it. In my dad’s desire to live like Jesus he simply did what came naturally to him. Was my dad wrong in touching that untouchable man? Should he have stayed six feet away and breathed through a mask? That question will never be answered, nor should it be. Human suffering and our reaction to it should never be relegated to simple yes or no calculations. People are more than just the purposeless accumulation in one place of a hundred billion random evolutionary accidents. Each person is just that, a person, with hopes, dreams and fears that need to be dealt with individually. What I can say with certainty is that the three-second handshake on the dock 50 years ago changed my life. That act of selfless love helped set the course for the life I am now living. Those three seconds gave joy, however fleeting, to the fisherman and gifted him with a memory he took to the grave. They gave me a way of life to pursue. I was very proud of my dad. I hope I am like him.
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