Handle with Care

How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

Lore Ferguson Wilbert

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781535962339
• eBook ISBN: 9781535962322
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Whether it’s fearful side hugs on one side or sexual abuse on the other, both the culture and the church aren’t doing very well with touch. Singles are staying single longer, dating is wrought with angst over purity, and marriages struggle to not interpret all forms of touch as sexual. Even the Bible seems to have endless rules about not touching things. There is simply no place where touch doesn’t seem threatened or threatening. 

But a curious thing happens when Jesus comes into His ministry: He touches. Jesus touches the sick and the outcast, the bleeding and the unclean. 

What could it mean for families, singles, marriages, churches, communities, and the world to have healthy, pure, faithful, ministering touch? Somewhere in the mess of our assumptions and fears about touch, there is something beautiful and good and God-given. As Jesus can show us, there is ministry in touching.

Chapter One

Using Our Hands to Live

Touch has a memory.8

—John Keats

We used our hands in our home—to speak, punish, work, play, and love. And it was not an undemonstrative home. It was a rowdy, creative, busy household, and I was the only girl of eight children.

Thirty years ago the ten acres on which we lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was grown thick with trees and covered with boulders, brush, and bloodroot. It was the perfect place to raise a brood of boys and their tomboy sister. At night we lay tangled in crocheted blankets around the living room listening to my mother read aloud, and those stories came alive during our day. We were cops and robbers, orphans and bandits, pirates and sailors. The last words we heard when heading out to play were: “Don’t come back until dark unless you’re bleeding.” We knew that quite literally to mean we were not to come back unless we were quite literally bleeding—which was an often-enough occurrence that the emergency room at our local hospital knew the Fergusons by name. I don’t think any of us has broken a bone or needed stitches fewer than eight times each.

We were a tactile bunch then and now, as adults scattered throughout the United States with our respective spouses, significant others, and children. When we get together at my mom and her husband’s house, I am not there more than ten minutes before I have an adult brother rubbing my shoulders, poking me in the side, or dropping a languid arm around my shoulders.

I may be the second oldest, but I am without question the shortest, a fact about which my youngest brother—twenty years my junior—finds every opportunity to mention. He was fewer than two pounds when he was born nearly three months premature; I could once cup my hand in a C shape and tent it over his entire torso, my fingertips touching on either side of his NICU incubator mattress without my palm and the fragile skin of his chest touching one another. I’m delighted his now fully-grown man arms can rest atop my head when I visit.

Even though we were happy as a rowdy and tactile family, there was sometimes an aggressive atmosphere in our male-dominated home that didn’t fit my disposition. At a young age I was aware that the way I touched and wanted to be touched was somehow different and foreign from the way our household treated it. I didn’t like to wrestle. I didn’t even like it when my brothers wrestled. I didn’t like to be shoved and shuffled. But I also didn’t like to be kissed on my cheek or neck as my dad was prone to doing. I was deeply uncomfortable with the assumption that everyone ought to welcome touch in the manner in which it was initiated. I believed if someone wanted to tickle me (which I despised then and now), I had to accept that my bigger and stronger brothers would pin my arms down and I would be tickled. The same went for wrestling: if one wanted to engage in it, the assumption was the other had to engage in it. The same for kisses on my neck from my dad or a hug from one of my brothers. If I said no or expressed I was uncomfortable, I was made to feel guilty for not being tougher or not being the kind of little girl who liked her daddy’s kisses. Permission to say “no” wasn’t given, wasn’t even an option. Touch was non-negotiable. And that made it something I endured more than I appreciated.

Touch wasn’t always this fraught for me, though. As a small child, I remember loving it when my mother would rub small circles on my back or scratch my arm while I was draped across her lap. This strong woman birthed eight babies and the option of not being touched for one single second of the day might have been a welcome one, but she never refused our request for a back-scratch or a hug. I still think of her enveloping hugs when I hug someone today. They were warm and ample and tight, the way a hug ought to be.

This is not a memoir or a tell-all, so, reader, you’ll have to forgive my vague allusion to certain details of the story, but at a young age I was sexually abused. This is when, if I trace my memories back correctly, my aversion to being touched without asking for it began. The asking became an important piece for me, a piece I couldn’t recognize until less than a decade ago. Because something was taken from me without my permission, I began to conflate all forms of touch with someone taking something from me. In a way, that made sense—after all, good versions of touch are supposed to be healthy both in their giving and their reception simultaneously. But in my case, the touch hadn’t been healthy—it was taken, not given. I began to steel myself against the coffee-breathed kisses of my dad, the beer-battered hugs of my grandfather, the cigarette-soaked kisses of one uncle, the cologne-scented hugs of another uncle, and the touch of any teen boy with the musk of dirty socks, Old Spice, and weed.

The only adult male I welcomed a hug from was my horse-farming-construction-working uncle who always smelled of sweat and earth, horse manure and hard work, with a tinge of red wine. His touch I trusted. As I grew, I would add more and more people to the list of those I trusted with touch, but I treated many as if they had to earn it.

Finding and Dodging Trusted Touch as a Young Adult

The list of those I trusted grew when I had my first kiss at age thirteen. I had never heard the terminology “heavy petting” until my family ventured into the most conservative ilk at the time—the homeschool culture of the 1990s—but my middle school boyfriend and I took that phrase to its most intimate levels using a different terminology. He laughed at me for not knowing what first, second, or third base were, and then introduced me to all three of them one week when our families were vacationing together. That we remained virgins in the technical sense is a miracle to me.

Like most middle school romances, we lasted only a few weeks, after which we didn’t talk for months until he sent a letter to me expressing how sorry he was for his actions. Somehow it never occurred to me that I also owed him an apology. Though we were both young and I was certainly impressionable, he didn’t “take advantage of me” against my will. Yes, our touch was immature and wrong. And yes, neither of us knew the long-term consequences of what we were doing. But we didn’t know at thirteen years old that legally speaking, minors aren’t considered able to give consent. As far as we both knew, this experience was mutual in every way. He was the introducer of the sin, but I eagerly took part, interested in it, wanting to go along. Though many young teen girls may have been uncomfortable or fought off the advances of this boy had they been in my shoes, I didn’t. I liked it, and I was just as culpable for our actions.

That brief middle-school romance awakened something in me. It awakens in all of us at some point, I suppose, but in our fumbling hands and hot breaths under his sleeping bag, I had experienced my first orgasm and it was electrifying, terrifying, and addicting. I was naive enough to think this strange jolt of pleasure was going to result in pregnancy. I nearly held my breath until my next period, crying with relief when it finally came.

This began a years-long battle with masturbation and a history of either no touch at all with boyfriends or the opposite—nearly unhindered touch. I was unable to remain ambivalent about touch.

Around this time, I met the girl who has been my closest friend ever since. We were neighbors and we became inseparable. My own home was brimming with the male anatomy, but here, in her, was my likeness, my mirror. For the first time in my life I was fully comfortable with my body. There was never anything erotic in our love for one another. It was simply the beauty of commonality, something I’d never before experienced.

We would sleep squeezed against one another in her slanted ceiling bedroom at night, staring at the plastic glow-in-the-dark star constellations above us. We would hold hands while we walked or talked, and hug every time we saw one another, which was every day. We thought nothing of changing in front of one another, using the bathroom in front of one another, or jumping into or out of the shower while the other was there. My body was comfortable with her. Fully. Completely. Not inappropriately. Not sexually. Simply the experience of being.

When I was eighteen, my family moved six hours north of our childhood home and, shortly after, one of my younger brothers was killed suddenly in an accident. My childhood friend was on my family’s doorstep as quickly as possible, and while I woke weeping all night long that first night, her body curved at my back, her hand brushed my sweaty hair back and her fingers tracked my tears down my face. This kind of selfless love was and still continues to be astounding to me. Besides my husband, she is still the one with whom I am most comfortable physically. She knows me completely and loves me. When we grew up she became a massage therapist, and she still gives more freely of her touch than anyone I have ever known—there is a strange kind of purity in it. It is one of the most profound expressions of phileo, brotherly love.9 Familial love.

In this moment of agony, I needed human contact. This is something I think Jesus understands about mourning. Though my ailment at the time was not blindness, this friend’s actions reminded me of Jesus when He healed the blind men in Matthew 20:29–34. When He sees their distress, their utter brokenness, and their inability to comfort or heal themselves, He doesn’t pray for them from afar or simply yell “be healed!” from the other side of the room. Instead, we’re told that “moved with compassion, Jesus touched their eyes.”10 When Jesus is undone over human suffering, He comes close and He touches. Yes, His moments of healing were not just one-off instances of compassion; they were pointing to the nature of God’s Kingdom that was afoot. When He touched and healed, it wasn’t for mere show—it was pointing to something much greater. But still, when moved with compassion, Jesus touched. And He usually touches in the particular place of pain or lack—for these men, it was their eyes. In suffering, Jesus gets closer than a family member would, but in the purest of ways. As I look back, I can see this is the type of compassion my friend displayed for me.

I had boyfriends throughout my teens and twenties, but the relationships weren’t very affectionate. After all, I was the product of a conservative homeschool culture, aged fifteen when the bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye was released. It turns out, if you read that book, you didn’t only kiss dating goodbye, you kissed kissing goodbye too. In fact, there was a collective fear of any kind of physical touch in any relationship before marriage within our purity culture. And, like every good product of legalism, we took everything to the extreme. This meant most of my relationships were short-lived, secretive, or so physically restrained we could barely brush shoulders with one another without feeling guilty.

In my early twenties, my most serious boyfriend and I couldn’t figure out why we made such great friends but couldn’t make all the love stuff materialize. I look back now (with no regrets) and see why. We barely touched one another. I was terrified of “giving my heart away”11 in the form of holding hands. He was unwilling to “awaken love until the appropriate time”12 in the form of small kisses or caresses. So our entire relationship was made up of delight and deep conversations and an unbelievably deep fear of expressing our affection for one another in a physical way.

Meanwhile, the trust of touch I had lost as a child was in many ways revived, and my brotherly love for everyone else in my life—male and female—was effusive. I was known for my warm touch; my mom’s gift of giving enveloping hugs had been imparted to me and now my hugs even had their own nickname: “Lore Hugs.” Yet in the relationship I cared most about (my boyfriend’s and mine), I withheld touch completely. Most of my future dating relationships would follow the same system of thought and practice.

Confidence and Confusion in My Twenties

I had moved out of my parents’ home shortly after my younger brother was killed and my youngest brother (the two-pound preemie) was born. This began a stint of living with over thirty-eight different roommates until marriage. Thirty-eight different women in various stages and stations of life. Some worked full time, some worked three jobs, some were in college, some in graduate school, some were in recovery, some weren’t believers, some were my best friends, some felt like a blip on my life radar. But all of them mark my years of singleness.

Something happens when we live in long seasons of singleness: Many of us begin to feel starved of good, healthy, edifying touch. I wasn’t living with family anymore. And I wasn’t in middle school anymore, squeezing together on a twin bed with my best friend at night talking about dreams and boys under glow-in-the-dark stars. I’ve never had that kind of relationship with another friend. But with all these roommates, I knew healthy touch had to be possible and good. I made it my aim to welcome the human need for physical touch among my roommates and engage my own felt need.

I had no idea that what seemed like healthy ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Using Our Hands to Live
• Chapter Two: Speaking the Same (Love) Language
• Chapter Three: Broken Bloodlines
• Chapter Four: Touch of Self
• Chapter Five: The Loving Life of Singleness
• Chapter Six: Opposites Don’t Always Attract
• Chapter Seven: True Love Doesn’t Wait to Touch
• Chapter Eight: Subjects and Objects in Marriage
• Chapter Nine: Let the Little Children Come
• Chapter Ten: Remember, Remember
• Afterword: A Letter to Those Who Have Been Abused
• Questions for Reflection or Conversation