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• Our hands are suited for expression.
• Illustration: Imagine a documentary showed your hands at work through your lifetime.
  - Illustration: Once when Lucado was visiting an elderly woman’s home in order to help plan her husband’s funeral, he saw upon the wall several notes that he had written to the woman’s late husband. The notes had touched him deeply, unbeknownst to Lucado.
• The kind hand of Christ changes lives, as in the story of the leper in Matthew 8.

• Illustration: Lucado imagines what the leper in Matthew 8 may have experienced.
• Throughout Scripture, the leper is representative of the ultimate outcast, banished to a leper colony.
• Illustration: Lucado imagines how the leper’s friends and community retreated from him in horror when they learned he was diseased.
• Illustration: Lucado relates how one Sunday basketball player David Robinson showed up at the church and the congregation flocked him, seeking his autograph. By contrast, in the next service a homeless man sat in the front of the sanctuary, and no line formed to greet him.

• Illustration: The leper walked to his village and spied his daughter lingering as the other children fled at the sight of him, which gave him the courage to approach Jesus.
• When the leper approached Jesus to heal him, once again the others scattered, but Jesus lovingly touched the man and verbally healed him.
  - Illustration: When St. Francis of Assisi left his city and worldly wealth behind, he embraced a leper on the side of the road, whom he later concluded was really Jesus in disguise. As Jesus said, “For whatever you’ve done for the least of these … you’ve done also for me.”

• A godly touch is powerful.
  - Illustration: One day Lucado saw his three daughters playing together, a rarity because of their age differences, and his heart jumped. He thought that God must feel the same way when he sees his children reaching out to each other.
  - Illustration: When Lucado was 19 and a soon-to-be alcoholic, he felt God’s touch one night on his shoulder and knew he was being forever changed.