Jesus was a Physical Therapist

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Mohandas Gandhi

Many people spend much of their lives deciding what they want to do for a living.  I don't like the use of the word occupation because it implies that your time is merely occupied, or just not used well.  A job implies that something is ephemeral, or transitory.  I feel that this too is inappropriate because it implies that the thing you do will be merely washed away by the rain someday and that it will have been meaningless.  Career is too professional and it sounds like resume.  Profession implies that one is an expert at their field.  This implies rankings which makes the title even more pointless because there are no ranking of experts (even Doctor's rankings do not reflect true competency; they could kill the next person they operate on).  Livelihood is a cool way of saying what we mean because it implies that our life's purpose is the work that we do.  Calling is very religious because it implies that you were informed by a supreme Being.  Employment sounds very hierarchal and thus stratified.  Let's just leave this as an open ended question of what to call whatever it is we are looking for?

The bible that I was taught often refers to hands as a means the symbol of purpose.  God extends his hands to save us.  Jesus extended his hands towards heaven on the cross; the same hands he used to heal all ailments.  We join hands as a symbol of cooperation.  Any parable that Jesus tells of workers is about farmhands or about lending a hand.  It seems like this theme is important.  I thought about the hands more because they are important.  Without hands we can give very little physical work.  Most of our actions are with our hands.  When we steal or take away, it is with our hands.

I feel as though it would be important to talk about the hands in the sense of my life's work.  I want to use my hands because it has been a never ending purposeful tool of the human body.  Thumbs are the major feature that set us apart from any creature.  Holding someone's hand is the purest form of affection.  I would like to make my hands a part of my work.  Aside from using the Beatitudes, my purpose is to use my hands to ease suffering and give health and life.  I entitled this article Jesus was a Physical Therapist because I feel as though Jesus used his power to ease the suffering of the poor and distraught. While helping the poor is more of a matter of the mind and the tongue (telling your bank to give the money to the poor) I feel as though my life's work is to use massage/physical therapy/personal training/rehabilitation/my hands to help ease suffering.  While I didn't gain much from the actual experience of helping my grandmother walk better (the progress she made was minimal in my mind and the things that I did were so effortless), I did discover that the act of helping her made me see what I want to do with my hands.  My hands can ease suffering.  Maybe only to one person, maybe only for an hour or two, but it was a greater good.

While I hope to create large scale goodness, especially in the form of feeding the hungry, I will always remember that I can offer up a massage to help soothe the pain of the human body in someone else.  I love that this is the simplest and most pure form of care that I can provide, and I am hoping to become more skilled at this craft.