The Block She Keeps Unpicking

The seam ripper has a worn spot on the handle where her thumb goes.

She is at the quilting frame in the back room, the one that was a bedroom until the children grew up and left, and the block in front of her is the third one this week she has taken apart. Nine patches. Plain as a checkerboard. Her grandmother could piece one in an evening with a lamp and a bad hip.

The trouble is the middle. Four seams are supposed to meet in one point, and hers meet in a small crowded knot, off by about the width of a pencil line. Nobody on this earth would see it once the quilt is on a bed. She has said that out loud twice, in the voice she uses on other people.

Then she picks up the ripper.

The furnace kicks on and rattles the vent behind her chair. There is coffee on the windowsill in the mug with the chip in the handle, and it went cold about the time she started, and she will drink it anyway.

Forty stitches out. Press it flat with her thumbnail. Line the seams up. Sew.

Then the light comes across the frame the way it does around four o'clock, low and yellow through the window over the machine, and it lies down along the cotton, and there is the knot in the middle, sitting exactly where it sat before.

She has been at this longer than the quilt. She was doing it at thirty two, at a kitchen table, with a different fault and the same hands. There is one thing about herself she has taken apart and sewn back for forty years. Sharpness, she would call it. The word that gets out ahead of her. The way she can let three days go by without calling somebody back, and then feel it sitting in her chest like a stone in a shoe. She kept a list of it in the back of a Bible once, and the list never changed.

And you know the block I mean, because there is one in your house too, and yours is not made of cotton. It is the temper that walks into the room ahead of you. The sentence that comes out at your own table and lands on somebody you love. It has been taken apart and sewn back so many times that the fabric is going soft at the seam. And every so often the light comes across it at four o'clock, and the knot is right where it was.

Nobody ever fixed a seam by staring at it

Let me say the plain thing first. Looking hard at what is wrong with you has never once made you into somebody different. It has made you tired, and it has made you the leading expert in the county on one small knot of cotton. You could name the year it started and the kitchen it started in.

And the tiredness is honest tiredness. Forty years of taking out stitches is forty real years, and there is nobody standing behind your chair with a clipboard. Not God, and certainly not me.

But there is a sentence in Scripture that moves the eyes off the block entirely, and the whole of this shelf rests on it.

Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus.Hebrews 3:1

Read the verb. Consider. That is a looking word, not a scrubbing word and not a measuring word, and it is handed to a room of believers who were worn thin and thinking about quitting.

You are already inside the work that changes you, and the needle is not in your hand. Hebrews 3:1 sets a tired congregation to considering Jesus and never once sets them to considering themselves, and it is the Spirit of God who does the changing while the considering goes on, so none of this waits on you to get four seams to meet.

Notice who the verse hands her. Not a technique. A person. An Apostle, the One who was sent, and a High Priest, the One who stands in for her at the only bench that matters. She has been trying to be her own bench for forty years, and no wonder her arms ache.

His word says our High Priest is touched with the feeling of our weakness, and it is His Spirit who carries that sentence off a page and into a back bedroom on a Tuesday. You are considered by Him while you are considering Him, and the traffic on that road runs both ways.

A face turned to the window is not working at it

Now let me say what considering Him is not, because this is where good people go wrong.

It is not a discipline anybody can perform badly. There is no posture to get right, no number of minutes that counts, no feeling to reach before it takes. The minute looking at Christ becomes one more line on the list, the list has swallowed the cure, and the ripper comes back out with a finer point on it.

Nobody ever got brown arms by concentrating on the sun. A woman carries a bowl of beans out to the porch and sits where the light is falling, and at supper somebody says she has caught some color. She did not do the catching. She did the sitting.

The word says that when a person turns to the Lord the veil is taken away, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. You have an unveiled face at this frame, in this light, and nobody had to earn one. So the looking is not effort buying something from God. It is a face turned into light that was already coming through the window before anybody threaded a needle.

That is the mercy inside the mechanism. A woman who has broken every promise she made herself since January can still look. Looking is the one thing the most worn out person in the house can still do, which is very likely why God built it that way.

The changing happens where you cannot watch it

Here is the hard comedy of sitting this close to your own block: nobody alive is worse placed to see it change.

So ask the people who have been around you fifteen years. They will not describe the fault you would describe. They will say something about how you deal with waitresses now, or about a stretch of years when they used to brace a little when your name came up on the phone, and how long it has been since they braced.

Scripture says the good work begun in you belongs to the One who began it, and He is the one carrying it on, and His Spirit does not wait on your paperwork before He starts. You were being changed straight through the years you could not see a thing happening, and the fact that you cannot list them is not evidence against them. Growth underground is still growth. Nothing that was ever planted filed a report.

This is also the place where writing like this starts grading people, so let me refuse it in advance. Nobody on this site is going to tell you where you ought to stand by now, or hold up somebody's overnight turnaround as the shape yours is supposed to take. God has never worked to a clock, His or anybody else's, and He has never once laid your work down beside another woman's to see whose seams are straighter.

And if the thing you keep taking apart is landing on somebody, on you or on the people in your house, take the next part exactly as it is written here. Bringing another person into it does not mean a woman's faith gave out, and it is not a route around God either. It is one of His ordinary means, in the same way that a needle and good thread are ordinary means. A doctor, if the body is anywhere in this, because pain and sleep and whatever the blood is short of will change what a woman sees in her own work. A counselor, and she gets the unpicked version, not the one that goes to church on Sunday. One friend who will not flinch. And if the dark hours have gone somewhere well past regret, into wondering whether this house would run easier without you in it, call or text 988 while it is still tonight, and ask somebody to come and sit on the porch until it is morning.

You have had company at that frame, and you were never sitting there on your own through any of those forty years. His word calls Him the God who is near to the brokenhearted, and Jesus called His Spirit the Helper, a name that says what He does with His hands and not what He thinks of yours. Nobody in this house was ever asked to do the hard part alone.