“Since you’ll already be halfway around the world, you might as well keep going,” the woman said to me, her hands dripping with soap suds as she helped wash the dishes. “You know, you could cross Siberia by train.”

Those words, said so casually one Sabbath afternoon by a lunch guest, literally turned my world upside down. Yes! I thought. Why should I go home the same way I came?
Three months after my twentieth birthday, I launched my world circumnavigation from my student-missionary post in Pohnpei. Having enjoyed an amazing, life-changing time there in that beautiful jungle oasis in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I set my face toward Nebraska via the Soviet Union! I carried with me a few travelers’ checks, a garage-sale backpack my mom had sent me, and a photocopied world map I had scotch-taped together. In other words, a world tour planned without the Internet.

Months of adventurous travel eating fried noodles in Asia finally landed me on the easternmost shores of the “Evil Empire”—the USSR. As our coal-fired train rumbled along, I sat looking out the window. It was mid July and hot. On long, sweeping corners, I caught occasional glimpses of our engine, thirty or more cars ahead, belching black smoke as we chugged through the vast, virgin birch forest. It was beautiful, like a scene from a John Wayne western.

In our passenger compartment, grime covered the synthetic wood and aluminum interior. It appeared not to have been cleaned since its maiden voyage in 1964. The only parts with any shine were the elbow rests and door handles. In the clanging, jostling, dark passage where one train car coupled to the next was the entrance to the toilet. The flushing handle operated a simple flap that provided a view of the railroad ties speeding by below.
Our train car had pairs of benches facing each other, with three passengers per bench. My cramped seat faced west. Across from me sat a large, blond sailor. Next to him was a young boy, perhaps nine years old, and an old man, seemingly the boy’s grandfather, with a cap on his head, a wool twill jacket and a stubbly beard. On my bench was my travel mate, George, and to his left sat a babushka traveling with a hoard of cloth bags stuffed with jars of pickles and sausages wrapped in newspaper. The sailor near the window had taken off his shirt and was smoking a cigarette as he cooled his left armpit in the breeze that was supposed to give the rest of us fresh air.
With fully 5,188 miles of track between us and Moscow, we sat smiling and staring at each other and attempting conversation. The sailor was determined that I should learn Russian, so he began to instruct me with increasing intensity, as if getting up to ramming speed. The only Russian word I knew was Perestroika, but I was too fearful to utter it. (I had the KGB heebie-jeebies from the moment I entered the country until I left.) As it became apparent to the sailor that he and I weren’t soon going to be able to chat about the October Revolution in his native tongue, he fell into despondent silence and lit another cigarette.
I pivoted my attention to the boy who had been the sailor’s cheerful assistant during my torture of the last half hour. I thought to try the universal language of math. I pulled out a piece of paper and jotted a math problem: 487 + 568. The boy quickly jotted 1055. I raised my eyebrows in approval and smiled. Next I wrote: 363 × 58. Without blinking an eye, the boy wrote 21,054. Hmmm, this young communist mind was sharp. So, this nine-year-old wanted a duel, did he? A showdown it would be, then—East against West; Karl Marx vs. Thomas Jefferson. I began to concoct an equation that could unlock the mysteries of cold fusion.
While I scratched away with my pencil, piling on mathematical symbols to confound the young Garry Kasparov, the grandfather said something to the boy who dug in a cloth knapsack, pulled out a paper bag of sunflower seeds in their shells and poured them out on the table. The grandfather pulled his hands from beneath the table where they had been resting on his lap, carefully pressed the sunflower seeds into his palms and then licked them off.
I gaped, and a pang of pity cut through me. Every digit on both of the old man’s hands had been cut off. His palms looked like two fleshy spatulas. I motioned to them, asking, “What happened?” The boy wrote one word on my tablet: “Stalin.” I never learned what Stalin had against this man—what particular talent he had possessed that had offended the dictator. Had he been a musician? An artist? A craftsman of some sort? Perhaps he was a mathematician! Somehow Stalin had thought that if he could maim the man, he could remove his power to influence.
Since my trip across Siberia, I have thought differently about hands. Hands create and help and comfort. Hands are a person’s ability to impact the world.
Today there is another who is out to destroy. He doesn’t have to kill men, just keep their hands occupied with unimportant things that are self-absorbed, trivial and vain. If he can keep Christian hands local, idle and serving only themselves, he can maim the movement of God.
Today I invite you to look at your hands, for they are God’s gift to you. More than that, your hands are God’s gift to others!
I am convinced that Satan would like to render your hands inactive. Perhaps the most important thing you can ever say to your own saved soul is, “God has mighty plans for my hands!” And then live that way. I know a woman who plunged her hands into soapy water one Sabbath afternoon and changed my life. What simple deed will your hands find to do? Maybe your hands should go as a tentmaker. The other side of the earth is waiting.

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