August 2020
After a year and a half, I finally pulled the last thread and I am finished. I made a quilt. What a long, tedious, rewarding journey it has been. I began weeks after I discovered I was carrying our first child. I knew immediately that this was the final push I needed to start the quilt I had always dreamt of making.There is nothing like the impending arrival of a child to motivate you to tie up any loose ends and tackle projects that have been put off for too long. I had always dreamed of making an heirloom quilt that could be passed down through my family, especially because I have fond memories of my own childhood quilt.
An Indonesian woman and one of my mom's dearest friends, Dede, made matching heart quilts for my sister and me. I still have my quilt, though it looks nothing like it did when I first received it. It's been with me through 20 of the 24 years of my life. I can still see it hanging off my single bed in my periwinkle room– the room with the butterfly nets hanging on the wall and an aquarium lighting up the dark walls at bedtime. I can still see it on my bunk at college. Something familiar, securing and reminiscent of home, in a season where everything was changing. I see it wrapped around me on all the road trips back and forth from Florida to South Carolina– AC on high, audiobook playing and a Starbucks double-shot in reach.
I see it on our white couch in our first home as newlyweds; a time when I felt the weight of my childhood behind me and the rest of my life ahead. The reality of officially "growing up" had set in and I couldn't turn back to the comfort of being a child again. It’s a bitter-sweet time when the days of walking down the hall and knocking on your parent's door in the middle of the night are no longer. When life isn't quite as care-free anymore and barbie games and trampolines and Lizzie McGuire slowly turned into college papers, student loans, complex relationships and life-long vows. But the quilt was there, symbolizing a past-time that felt simpler, purer, more innocent.
Again, the quilt was wrapped around me as love turned two into three and my body became a home for another. On many-a-morning I would lay nauseous on the couch with the stainless steel bowl in reach as Shane made me oatmeal. I cried into that quilt over the weakness I fought, the burden of being a living-sacrifice, the weight of fostering a new soul. Surrendering to the exhaustion my body felt, I’d sink into the worn patchwork once again.
I've considered mending my quilt and replacing the withered fabric but I can never seem to bring myself to do it. I don't want to change the original because then it wouldn't be the same quilt that's traveled with me all these years. All the bright pinks and baby-blues are now faded. The loose threads and tattered edges speak of the time that it's been cherished and the many years in which I've lived, grown and changed since I first received it as a pig-tailed four-year-old. The faded colors tell its story and each tattered block holds a memory.
I wonder what this new quilt will weather with my little girl, as she travels through the heights and depths of life. Already we've been wrapped under it together on our "sick day" as we watched Winnie the Pooh for the first time– sippy-cup in one hand and cheerios in the other. We are making our own memories now, just as I did when I was younger, wrapped under that labor of love. Time is elusive and suddenly I am no longer the little girl being cared for; instead, I have a little girl myself, sitting beside me, growing up with me. Her story is just beginning. I wonder if this quilt will be present in some of her favorite memories when she looks back one day; will it embody a large part of her childhood for her, as it has for me?
It's amazing that something as basic as a blanket intended for warmth has become something women throughout all of history have put time, creativity, energy and love into. This basic, utilitarian necessity became a piece of artistic expression, communicating love to the people who lay under them. Isn’t this what’s so wonderful about being image-bearers? We take the ordinary, most basic items and fashion them into works of art. These women inspire me and encourage me to make beauty out of the very “scraps” of life– the rejects, the remnants.
My quilt is far from perfect. There are crooked lines, loose thread and subtle stains from the coffee I sipped while working on it. But I take comfort in remembering the Amish women who would intentionally include one obvious mistake into each quilt, resembling the imperfect nature of each of our lives. In an exquisite king sized quilt of striking blue and white squares, they would include one small red square in the left bottom corner, catching the eye of the beholder. These little "mistakes" make them human, real, honest. There are always those mistakes, those crooked lines in our lives that we would rather hide or forget about– but these are the things that make our lives more beautiful, meaningful. These are the very stories worth telling.
My mom and dad started a business on the most densely populated island in the world— hand-stitched, one-of-a-kind quilts in the tropics, of all places! Turns out, Indonesians, with their small, nimble hands were incredibly talented quilters. What started as a small group of people meeting to sew in my parent’s garage trying to earn enough to feed their families, turned into a warehouse with over 400 workers sewing masterpieces– quilts that outshine the most beautiful Amish quilts I've seen. My parents offered these people jobs, dignity and access to hearing the gospel for the very first time. Not one quilt was identical. And behind each quilt was a maker who spent hours upon hours laboring over this gift.
I remember my mom saying when I was younger, "God uses the scraps of our lives and turns them into a beautiful tapestry." Maybe this is when my love of bold textiles laid next to each other was born– as I heard stories of lives transformed and how blankets could bring people to feel loved and taken care of. I imagined our lives as separate pieces and scraps that don't seem to be worth much from our limited, human perspective but when sewn together and quilted by God, the Master Artist, we become a magnificent tapestry.
As I stitched this quilt, I reflected on the slow work of God. Almost anything worth doing is slow. Art takes time. Beauty is often tedious. Time and patience for slow isn’t something easy to come by in our day. We prefer the fast, the instant-gratification, the quick, measurable results. We are always in a hurry and we sacrifice so much because of it. We are losing quality. Patience. Character. Value. Traditions passed down through hundreds of generations are being lost because they're archaic, unnecessary, old-fashioned. They don’t meet our criteria for what is “worthwhile.” We don't have time. And even if we did, we have lost the desire to pass things, tangible things and valuable skills onto the next generation.
It is such a simple patchwork quilt and part of me feels awfully silly that it took this long to finish. But cutting the squares, the stitching, the ironing, the needle work is tedious and I am finding that repetitive activities are hard in a world where attention-spans are less than five seconds. There is a soul-nourishing quality about doing something with your hands. About making slow, inch-by-inch progress, not knowing what the end result will be or when you will arrive. I’m afraid that in our digital age, we don’t make time for these crafts. Rogowski, in his book Handmade, says “We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except to poke at a screen.” Do we use our hands for making anymore? We do so much consuming and so little creating. But these hands-on activities are deeply-rewarding in a way that doesn't compare to our digital activities. They help us feel less like information-consuming robots and more truly human, exhibiting our God-given command to “be fruitful and multiply” and spread His beauty wherever we go.
Slowly chipping away on this quilt gave me time to reflect on what life is and what it means and how to live it well. When my belly was growing daily and I was cutting out the squares, I wondered about the child I felt kicking inside– Are you a boy or a girl? What will we name you? What will you be like? Look like? How will I manage as your mother? This time to reflect is rare and priceless in a world where little black boxes occupy our minds nearly every minute of the day. This quietness, this tedious pulling of the thread, slow-work, is what my heart craves in a world that is so loud and so fast. You have to fight for it. You must seek it out in the margins of your day.
In past seasons I have clung to God as my bread of life, sacrificial lamb, or the good Shepherd but in this season I have a fresh image of His love for me as a quilt. During this project a verse that has become very dear to me came from when the Psalmist is reflecting on the all-encompassing love of God: "You hem me in, behind and before" (Ps 139:5). David must have been referring to a military tactic, but my mind has always imagined it as the straight and folded lines of a finished blanket...fastened and without frays. A perfectly hemmed quilt is like the deep, all-securing love of God. Something we cannot break out of, no matter how hard we try to fight and kick our way out of the hold. He is the master-quilter that supplies the cover for our sin. He transforms our tattered remnants into something of beauty and significance. The psalmist’s prayer of being hemmed in became my prayer for my baby, as I sewed each piece together. I pray that she would always feel assured of the boundless love of God, of the tight threads that fasten her that will never break loose. I pray she feels God's love like a quilt– an enveloping, comforting, safe place for her to rest her body at night.
