What Is the Right Hand Doing?

I speak three languages, and I don’t know my right from my left in any of those languages. All my life I have had to hold my left hand in front of my face with the thumb and forefinger extended forming an “L” to remind me that was left.

When I was growing up in rural Mississippi and spending time on my grandmother’s farm, they had mules, and I loved hooking one of them up to a wooden sled and letting the mule pull me through the fields. I could holler “Gee” and the mule would go right. “Haw” and the mule would go left. It is strange that I never had any trouble with left and right when I was behind a mule. I guess there was a lot of pressure on me because I did not want to be as dumb as the mule!

While living in West Africa I absolutely had to tell the difference between my right hand and my left hand. The culture there dictated that the left hand was your “dirty” hand because that was the one you used to clean up after performing your bodily functions. Therefore, a person never offered their left hand to greet someone. You would never give anything to anyone with your left hand. To touch someone with your left hand was taboo. You could not even wave to someone with your left hand.

Once when I was riding on my motorcycle through a village, I met a man on a bicycle. He was carrying some wooden poles about 12 feet long on his right shoulder and balancing them with his right hand. As I approached him, he jumped off his bicycle and shifted the poles to his left shoulder so he could wave at me with his right hand.

Of course, there were children who were born as natural left handers. So, the parents would take drastic measures if the child tried to use his left hand to eat with—many poor villagers still eat with their hands even today. The parents would tie a naturally left-handed child’s left hand behind her back, so she was forced to learn to eat with her right hand. I know there were many left-handed children because our sons grew up playing soccer with the local village boys and many of those boys preferred kicking the ball with their left foot.

I suppose I am not alone with the right and left challenge. The last verse of the book of Jonah in the Old Testament says, “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left” (ESV).

Today we use this popular expression “The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.” Generally, it is used in the context of referring to an organization where one part of the organization does not know what another part of the same organization is doing. Anytime this expression is used, it has a negative context.

But the origin of this phrase comes from Matthew 6:3 in the Bible: “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what the right hand is doing” (NIV).

I think that like today during the time that Matthew was written most people were right-handed. So, we could assume that one would give money with their right hand. Jesus uses this metaphor to remind us that we should even hide our good works even from ourselves.

Doesn’t it make you feel good to give money away? A joy of our lives is to give money to a person or a family in need or my church or a Christian charitable organization. We get real joy from sharing our resources with others.

If we continually replay in our minds our giving or our serving or other good works that we do, we begin to think how generous we are or how great we are or what a great follower of Christ we are. But we should give to honor the Lord and not to promote our greatness. If we puff ourselves up, we are like the Pharisees.

There is certainly a place for helpful evaluation and reflection when we have made a gift to honor the Lord, but it should be brief, and then we should move on according to Philippians 3:13: “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead” (NIV).

We have found great joy in sometimes giving gifts anonymously. I challenge you to try giving a gift to someone in need without them knowing it came from you.

My prayer: Oh, God, as I give may I give only to honor you and bring glory to you with you being my only witness.