{"id":746,"date":"2026-09-25T05:26:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T10:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/?p=746"},"modified":"2026-09-25T05:26:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T10:26:05","slug":"two-handfuls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/2026\/09\/25\/two-handfuls\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Handfuls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<!-- POST TITLE: Two Handfuls -->\n<style>@import url('https:\/\/fonts.googleapis.com\/css2?family=Oswald:wght@400;500;700&family=Newsreader:ital,wght@0,400;0,500;1,400&display=swap');\n.ohands{--bg:#F5ECCC;--darkest:#17343B;--mid:#275C65;--heading:#C04B42;--cool:#2F83A3;--light:#FFD279;--surface-verse:#FFF6E3;--surface-deep:#DCE8DE;font-family:'Newsreader',Georgia,serif;color:var(--darkest);background:var(--bg);max-width:720px;margin:2em auto;padding:2.5em 2em;line-height:1.7;font-size:1.05em}\n.ohands .eyebrow{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.85em;letter-spacing:.18em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);font-weight:500;margin:0 0 .4em}\n.ohands h2{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.3em;letter-spacing:.08em;text-transform:uppercase;color:var(--mid);margin:2em 0 .7em;border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding-bottom:.3em}\n.ohands .verse{font-family:'Newsreader',Georgia,serif;font-style:italic;font-size:1.08em;line-height:1.6;letter-spacing:normal;background:var(--surface-verse);border-left:4px solid var(--heading);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0;color:var(--darkest)}\n.ohands .verse-cite{display:block;font-style:normal;font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-size:.82em;letter-spacing:.1em;color:var(--mid);margin-top:.6em;text-transform:uppercase}\n.ohands .divider{border:none;border-top:1px solid var(--heading);margin:2em auto;width:80px}\n.ohands p{margin:0 0 1.1em}\n.ohands .pull{font-family:'Oswald',sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.15em;letter-spacing:.04em;color:var(--darkest);border-top:1px solid var(--heading);border-bottom:1px solid var(--heading);padding:1em 0;margin:1.6em 0;text-align:center;line-height:1.4}\n.ohands .ohands-deep{background:var(--surface-deep);border-left:4px solid var(--cool);padding:1.1em 1.4em;margin:1.4em 0}\n@media (max-width:600px){.ohands{padding:1.6em 1.2em}}<\/style>\n<div class=\"ohands\">\n<p class=\"eyebrow\">Open Hands &middot; Week 1 &middot; Friday &middot; STRESS<\/p>\n<p>He is seventy-one, and there is writing in every square on his calendar.<\/p>\n<p>The board he sits on. The two younger men he meets with. The airport runs, the hospital visits, the small church down the road that calls him every time their treasurer quits. A men&rsquo;s breakfast he has not missed in nine years.<\/p>\n<p>Not one of those is a bad thing. That is exactly the difficulty. There is nothing on that calendar you could point at and call foolish, or selfish, or a waste. Every single square is a good thing, done for good reasons, usually for somebody who needed it.<\/p>\n<p>The shortage shows up in one place only. He arrives at his own dinner table used up. His wife gets whatever is left after the good things have taken theirs, and what is left is a man who is present and not really there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"verse\">Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and pursuit of the wind.<span class=\"verse-cite\">Ecclesiastes 4:6 (BSB)<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>One Handful Against Two<\/h2>\n<p>Read what that verse is actually weighing. It is not setting a good handful against a bad one. Nobody needs a proverb for that.<\/p>\n<p>It is setting one against two. Both handfuls are full. Both are worth having. The second one is not junk &mdash; the second one is real, and good, and it is exactly the thing that costs you the tranquility.<\/p>\n<p>Which means the question in front of him is not <em>is this worth doing<\/em>. Everything on that calendar is worth doing. The question is whether it is his to do, and how many hands he thinks he has.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pull\">Every yes he said was a yes to something good. That is what made them so hard to stop saying.<\/p>\n<h2>What It Cost<\/h2>\n<p>He said no last month.<\/p>\n<p>Not to something questionable. To a good thing, run by good people, that he was genuinely the right man for &mdash; the kind of ask that arrives and makes you feel useful in a way that is difficult to describe to anyone under fifty.<\/p>\n<p>He said no, and they were kind about it, and they found somebody else inside of a week. He admitted later that the speed of it stung more than he expected. He had known, in some unexamined place, that he was needed. It turns out they needed someone, and he was one of several.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ohands-deep\">\n<p>That sting is worth naming, because it is often the actual reason the calendar fills. It is not always service. Sometimes it is the steady reassurance of being required somewhere, and a man can go a long time without noticing which one he is running on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>He was home on Thursday. Not just physically in the house &mdash; home, with something left in him, at his own table, with the one person who has been waiting for that version of him for about four years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Open Hands &middot; Week 1 &middot; Friday &middot; STRESS He is seventy-one, and there is writing in every square on his calendar. The board he sits on. The two younger men he meets with. The airport runs, the hospital visits,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-hands"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/SU_20260925_BLOG.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","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=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumbleup.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}