Old friends, marriages, and the slow patterning of life..

I'm working on getting the cake post up, just trying to get pictures organized first.  Suffice it to say that, after much toil, it was a huge success, and I'll have finished and unfinished pictures up soon!

In the meantime... I stumbled upon this reflection that I wrote quite a long time ago now, and it resonated with the events of this weekend: seeing old friends, witnessing a marriage, watching the transitions of life and seeing the emerging pattern of our lives a little bit more clearly, so I thought I'd share.

~~~~ The Master Knitter ~~~~

If we trust Him to be the Master of All, it shouldn't surprise us to find that He is also the Master of the Particulars; for instance, the Master of a particular discipline that He designed us to design.  Yet even so, when early women learned to knot string into garments by the use of sticks, and then later, when the first woman on the coast land of a seafaring country discovered that dropping a few stitches for awhile and then later integrating them in a different spot created unexpected and unmistakable patterns, who would have guessed that they were all merely imitating what the Divine Knitter had been doing all along with the strands of our lives?  For that is exactly what He does - joining a new color here, making two into one there, zigging where we expect a zag, and yes, putting stitches aside for awhile, only to bring them back in unexpected places, thus crafting strong cables, lifelines out of the blue.  And the most surprising part of it all is that these life-cables become in His hands not only functional, but beautiful.  The dropped stitches are never lost, nor is He merely fudging over mistakes, but rather masterfully making ever more intricate designs which, like those Aran sweaters, identify us as us, and even more splendidly link and twine us, each to each, in the grander tapestry that stretches unbroken across time.

~~~~

Prayers for my brother-in-law and new sister-in-law this week, as they celebrate their new marriage!  May our Lord bless their love richly, with fruitfulness, joy, and holiness.