{"id":340,"date":"2026-05-23T08:15:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T13:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=340"},"modified":"2026-05-23T08:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T13:15:19","slug":"bound-in-the-right-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/05\/23\/bound-in-the-right-hand\/","title":{"rendered":"Bound in the Right Hand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: Bound in the Right Hand -->\n<!-- CATEGORY: Get Up and Walk \/ Week 2 \/ Calling \/ Saturday Recap -->\n<style>\n@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;500;700&family=Lora:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;1,400&display=swap');\n.guaw{font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;color:#2c2c2c;background:#f5f5f0;max-width:720px;margin:2em auto;padding:2.5em 2em;line-height:1.7;font-size:1.05em}\n.guaw .eyebrow{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.85em;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#8B6F47;font-weight:500;margin:0 0 .4em}\n.guaw h1{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:2.2em;letter-spacing:.02em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#2c2c2c;margin:0 0 .5em;line-height:1.1}\n.guaw h2{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.3em;letter-spacing:.08em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#8B6F47;margin:2em 0 .7em;border-bottom:1px solid #D4A574;padding-bottom:.3em}\n.guaw .verse{font-family:'Lora',Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;font-size:1.08em;line-height:1.6;background:#fff;border-left:4px solid #D4A574;padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0;color:#2c2c2c}\n.guaw .verse-cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.82em;letter-spacing:.1em;color:#8B6F47;margin-top:.6em;text-transform:uppercase}\n.guaw .divider{border:none;border-top:1px solid #D4A574;margin:2em auto;width:80px}\n.guaw p{margin:0 0 1.1em}\n.guaw .pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.15em;letter-spacing:.04em;color:#2c2c2c;border-top:1px solid #D4A574;border-bottom:1px solid #D4A574;padding:1em 0;margin:1.6em 0;text-align:center;line-height:1.4}\n.guaw .signature{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.12em;color:#8B6F47;margin-top:2em;text-align:right;font-size:.95em;line-height:1.5}\n<\/style>\n<div class=\"guaw\">\n<p class=\"eyebrow\">Get Up and Walk \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Saturday Recap<\/p>\n<h1>Bound in the Right Hand<\/h1>\n<p>I have spent this week sitting with Ehud.<\/p>\n<p>The second judge of Israel. A left-handed man from a tribe whose name means &#8220;son of the right hand.&#8221; A deliverer with a bound right hand who carried a blade where no palace guard would think to look. A man whose body did not match his tribe&#8217;s name and who turned out to be the only man God could have used for the job.<\/p>\n<p>I have been thinking about my own bound right hand.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">I have been thinking about my own bound right hand.<\/p>\n<h2>What I Spent the Week Noticing<\/h2>\n<p>Most of my life I have half-believed something. The voice goes like this: <em>I am not a pastor. I do not have a seminary degree. I am a married father of four boys with a technical background. By most of the cultural metrics, I should not be the man writing devotionals. I should leave it to the credentialed men who do it for a living.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The voice has been there a long time. I have known a lot of men with the same voice in a different costume. The same voice that tells the husband he is too soft, the dad he is too anxious, the worker he is too plain-spoken, the neighbor he is not the guy to start the group. Same voice. Different costume.<\/p>\n<p>This week I noticed something.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that I am not a pastor is the exact thing that makes this voice land for the the people reading it. I am not preaching at you from a pulpit. I am a guy sitting at a kitchen counter wrestling with the same Saturday morning failures as you (not that a pastor is not BTW). I limp into the same things you do. The thing I have been calling my disqualification is the thing that lets the words actually reach the man on the other side of the screen.<\/p>\n<p>That is exactly what God did with Ehud.<\/p>\n<h2>One Verse I Keep Coming Back To<\/h2>\n<div class=\"verse\">Then the people of Israel cried out to the LORD, and the LORD raised up for them a deliverer, Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, a left-handed man.<span class=\"verse-cite\">\u2014 Judges 3:15, ESV<\/span><\/div>\n<p>I have read that verse a hundred times. I have never read it as slowly as I have this week.<\/p>\n<p><em>The LORD raised up.<\/em> God did the picking. God knew which body he was reaching for. God did not put out a Help Wanted ad and reluctantly settle on the left-handed Benjaminite because the right-handed candidates had not applied. God <em>raised up<\/em> the man whose right hand was bound.<\/p>\n<p><em>A left-handed man.<\/em> The Hebrew is <em>&#8216;itter yad-yemino<\/em>. Bound in his right hand. The Bible could have said &#8220;a son of Gera, the Benjaminite, who slew Eglon king of Moab&#8221; and moved on. It did not. It went out of its way to put his &#8220;defect&#8221; in the same sentence as his calling. Almost as if the writer wanted us to see it. Almost as if the writer wanted us to read that sentence and ask the same question I have been asking all week.<\/p>\n<p>What is bound in <em>my<\/em> right hand.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">What is bound in <em>my<\/em> right hand.<\/p>\n<h2>What I Want for You This Morning<\/h2>\n<p>I am making breakfast for the family this morning. I am going to limp into that kitchen with everything I am still carrying, the same way I did last Saturday. So will they. We are all left-handed men in a tribe of right-handers, in one form or another.<\/p>\n<p>I want you to do one thing today.<\/p>\n<p>Take the thing you have been calling your disqualification. The thing on every performance review. The thing your father pointed out. The thing your wife teases. The thing you got mocked for in seventh grade. The thing you have spent thirty years trying to hide or fix or grow out of.<\/p>\n<p>Hold it in your hand for a minute.<\/p>\n<p>Ask the question Ehud&#8217;s writer is asking. <em>What if God was raising me up with this, not in spite of it. What if this was the assignment all along. What if this is the very thing he is going to use.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The thing they called your defect is the thing God will use.<\/p>\n<p>Next week we sit with a young man who failed his first mission so badly that one of the giants of the early church refused to take him on the next trip. His name is John Mark. We are going to talk about second chances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"signature\">\u2014 Lance<br>Stumble Up<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Get Up and Walk \u00b7 Week 2 \u00b7 Saturday Recap Bound in the Right Hand I have spent this week sitting with Ehud. The second judge of Israel. A left-handed man from a tribe whose name means &#8220;son of the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-made-strong","category-self-reflection"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SU_20260523_BLOG.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}