The Conservator's Hands

In 2019, conservator Eliane Dotson spent fourteen months restoring Artemisia Gentileschi's seventeenth-century painting at the National Gallery in London. Every morning she arrived before dawn, washed her hands three times, and worked under magnification so precise she could see individual brushstrokes laid down four hundred years earlier.

When asked why she was so meticulous about her own physical habits — her diet, her sleep, even the lotion she used on her hands — Dotson explained simply: "These hands don't belong to me when I'm working on a masterpiece. They belong to the painting. I have no right to be careless with something entrusted to me by someone greater than myself."

She could have eaten whatever she wanted. She could have skipped sleep. She was free to do all of it. But she understood that not everything permissible was beneficial — not when you have been given custody of something that carries another's genius and glory within it.

Paul tells the Corinthians the same stunning truth. You were bought at a price. The Holy Spirit dwells within you. Your body is not a canvas you own — it is a masterpiece entrusted to you by the Almighty Himself. Every choice you make with it either honors or dishonors the Artist whose breath still lives in the brushstrokes of your being. "Therefore," Paul writes, "glorify God with your body." You are not your own. Live like someone who knows Whose hands shaped you.