The Word of the Month: Knitting
April 30, 2020
Happy spring time to all you peeps out there! I must say, this has been the strangest April ever. I’m sure you all are feeling the same way. We’ve been hunkering down in our homes, avoiding contact with everyone other than those in our immediate families, wondering whether life will ever get back to normal, and how normal that normal will be. We’ve had no big birthday bashes (we’ve had three FaceTime parties in our family), no going out to eat or to the movies, no filled-to-the-brim Easter Sunday celebrations with our church families, no work for many of us, and more intense work for others. Even weddings and funerals have been put on hold or downsized greatly. But even with all the sheltering going on amongst us humans, the natural world has gone about its regularly scheduled budding, blooming, leafing, greening, migrating, nesting, and storming. The earth continues to spin and the seasons come and go as always.
With all of this sheltering in place, I have been doing a lot of knitting. I have a large accumulation of yarn bought over the years because I liked the looks of it. Unfortunately, without a specific project in mind at the time of purchase, I’ve found it difficult to actually use it. I decided this month to knit scarves, because they are easy and take less yarn than most other projects. I don’t have to worry about running out of the yarn I start with before I’m finished, and even if I do, I can turn the scarf into a piece of art or a dog slobber wiper.
Knitting is a nice, relaxing activity for me, until “Oh, pootie-doo!!!” I’ve dropped a stitch or gotten off the pattern in a moment of distraction. I’m not great at fixing mistakes that I make in knitting. I try to pick up the dropped stitch or pull out the row I’ve messed up and start again, but often times I have to pull out all of it and start over from the beginning. This does not contribute to relaxation for me, and it has been happening way too much with my current scarf. It’s a somewhat lacy pattern, so if I mess up, I have a hard time correcting it so that it doesn’t show like a big old scar.
This morning it came to me that with this pandemic we’ve all been experiencing multiple scarring holes in the fabric of our lives. So many stitches of our everyday routines have been dropped, leaving holes that we can’t mend. Our pattern of life is messed up and we’re frustrated by our inability to get back on track with it. We’re afraid we may have to tear it all out and start over from scratch, using a different pattern.
The Bible says in Psalms 139: 13-16, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them” (ESV).
God knows how to knit, and He doesn’t mess up the pattern or drop stitches. He knows what He’s going to make out of this pandemic, and if we get out of the way and let Him do His work in our lives, this yucky business will become just another beautiful portion of his pattern for growing us into the masterpieces (poems!) He envisioned before creation. We may not be able to see it now, but someday, we’ll look back at this weird time and say, “Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.”
Remember what Paul longed for the believers in Colossians 2:2-3 (AMPC): “. . . that their hearts may be braced (comforted, cheered, and encouraged) as they are knit together in love, that they may come to have all the abounding wealth, and blessings of assured conviction of understanding, and that they may become progressively more intimately acquainted with and may know more definitely and accurately and thoroughly that mystic secret of God, [which is] Christ (the Anointed One). In Him all the treasures of [divine] wisdom (comprehensive insight into the ways and purposes of God) and [all the riches of spiritual] knowledge and enlightenment are stored up and lie hidden.”
May May bring us more insight!
