Stir

Stephen and Penelope’s in Amersterdam stirs my creativity. Their use of yarn in different ways pokes at the imagination and the incredible choices they offer make anything seem possible.

In 2Timothy 1:6 Paul tells Timothy to stir up his gift from the Holy Spirit. The Greek word invokes the idea of a bellows sparking embers into flames. We all have gifts from the Holy Spirit but it is up to us to nurture them, stir them up, and allow them to bear fruit.

The beautiful display of yarn at Stephen and Penelope stirs up the desire to create. It’s important to find what stirs the imagination. It could be a scene from nature, a piece of literature, scripture, music, or another person. We need to find these places that help us nurture our gifts and inspire us to use them.

Give yourself what Julia Cameron calls an Artist Date. Take yourself to the equivalent of Stephen and Penelope and feast your eyes on something you love, something that stirs up your imagination. This is an excellent way to recharge during what can be a stressful time of year. It can serve to spark the next creative endeavor.

Exult

When I think of the feeling of exultation, I think of young children playing or choirs of angels singing. This feeling fills us completely leaving no room for stray thoughts or nagging anxiety. To exult, we need to be free of the burdens of everyday life even if it’s just for a moment.

Christmas is the perfect time to exult. When we leave the church on Christmas Eve we can exult over the sure and certain fact that love came down on Christmas and walked the world showering all the unwanted, unseen, population with the intense love that only comes from God. This is the only thing that will ever fill us up completely. We all have what a friend of mine calls “the God Hole”. It’s that spot within us that we try to fill by buying stuff, by putting unrealistic expectations on our family, and by working too hard to obtain the next job that we think will be the answer to all our problems until we get it and it isn’t. Nothing can fill the hole within us except the love of God.

At Christmas, we get another chance to acknowledge that love and we can choose to let it fill us and when it does, we too will sing with exultation!

Share

A wonderful friend came over a few days ago. We had connected in a bookbinding class and she was coming over to help me create a journal cover. I had forgotten some of the skills I had learned over two years ago. She arrived and unloaded two bins of fabric, buttons, thread, paper which she had already folded into “signatures”, paint, glue, ribbon, and a host of other supplies.

We spent a lovely afternoon creating and chatting. She shared her materials, she shared her artistic gifts, and she shared herself.

Sharing is powerful. Sharing creates community.

I’ve been horrified at the devastation caused by the tornados, especially in Kentucky. We are such vulnerable creatures and when the infrastructure is taken away, we see how vulnerable we really are. Recovery can only happen when resources are shared. It is good to see that people are showing up with food and water to help those who have lost everything.

My friend offered up all of her beautiful fabric and art supplies with such generosity of spirit.

Sometimes we may forget that nothing really belongs to us. We get to be stewards of what comes into our hands.

We can continue to ask ourselves each day, what do I have to give? What do I have to share?

Expectation

Normally, I have high expectations for my yarn. I buy yarn for projects rather than just. because it’s beautiful. I have the end result in mind. The yarn pictured above was bought for the 2021 Stephen West shawl Mystery Knit Along (Mkal). A Mkal is when a bunch of knitters sign up to get a pattern in sections so you don’t have any idea what the end product will look like. We knew we were knitting a shawl but we didn’t know the design.

I had never done this before but I heard over 11,000 knitters from all over the world had signed up and I just had to jump on the bandwagon. It was an interesting experience to start a project with no expectations. I was able to be in the moment with the clue and follow the pattern step by step without any worry about the future.

I tend to have unrealistic expectations about the future. It’s a good thing I know this about myself so I can work at letting go of the unrealistic expectations. Letting go helps me enjoy whatever happens instead of being disappointed. Trying not to have unrealistic expectations helps me more flexible and open to new and different experiences.

It’s not that I think expectations are bad. We need to work toward something but it’s important to be flexible and able to reset expectations when things change.

At the time of Christ, people thought Jesus would come again in the near future. That didn’t happen but as Christians, we live in hope that the time will come when Jesus does return. To me, this return is about the realization of God’s kingdom on earth where no one is hungry or enslaved or suffering at the hands of another. This is an important expectation that we work toward a world that demonstrates “Your kingdom come, your will be done.”

Still on clue #2 our of 4.

Compassion

When others express compassion, it gives us hope. Compassion means more than just having feelings of sympathy, it means there is a desire from the compassionate person to help. When we receive the help we have hope for something better.

At church, we host five teenagers every summer to work in the gardens. They are paid by the city of Rochester. It works out, the teens have jobs and we have the labor to grow fresh vegetables for the challenged population in the Beechwood neighborhood. At the end of this past summer, one of the young men told us his story. He needed money for his family who were struggling. He was trying to get a job with hours that would not interfere with his high school classes. We felt compassion for his plight and we hired him and nurtured him. He started to feel hopeful for something better.

Sometimes we aren’t in a position to help but maybe we know someone who is.

Sometimes our help is not about being able to provide employment, sometimes it’s about just accompanying a person through a tough time.

Sometimes it’s just about giving the person the benefit of the doubt.

We don’t know what is going on in the lives of the person tailgating us, or cutting us off, or grabbing our grocery cart, or whatever bad behavior is happening around us. But we can ask “How can I help?” And sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Repent

Some biblical translations of the Bible translate the Greek word “metanoia” into repent. Metanoia means a transformative change in one’s life, a turning back to God. When I think about repenting, I think about starting over, turning back, and resuming my spiritual practice. Of course, I think about the sins I committed and the regret I have for some of my actions but mostly I think about getting back on track.

I have a daily spiritual practice that I do most days. However, sometimes I quit for stupid reasons and then I find it really difficult to begin again. My practice is to say morning prayer, read the scripture for the day, and then sit and knit in silence. Knitting in silence is my method for contemplative prayer. The knitting keeps me focused, my mind in the present moment, and directed toward God. My life is so much better when I’m consistently praying every day.

I knit on this “Holy Spirit” shawl during my prayer time. It’s knit in the round with steek stitches. I used to do one row but since it is growing by 2 stitches per row, one row takes way more time than I have to give. I decided to time my knitting instead but I find the alarm disturbing. I tried just knitting until I felt that I had prayed enough but then all I could think of was stopping.

This has been going on for about two weeks. It’s time to repent, turn back toward God, and get started again. I have a bunch of suggestions in my book “Contemplative Knitting” outlining what to do when your prayer practice goes off the rails but I have found it hard to take my own advice.

I confess to all of you that my practice has lapsed. I am repenting! I have started up again and I thank you for letting me be accountable to you.

Advent is a great time to think about where we have gone off track and how we can get back on track. We all need help with this. Find a trusted person, confess, and repent. I’ll be praying for you.

Splendor

Block from the Great Aran Afghan by Rose Farrington

In the past, splendor made me think of the gilded age, the ostentatious houses erected by the Vanderbilts and Astors. I remember touring the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina in December. There were decorated Christmas trees in every room on the tour. Imagine a 250 room house gilded with gold leaf and other trimmings. Splendor everywhere. Or is it?

I see splendor in the light of the sun on the lake, stars shining in the darkness, and the northern lights. I see the splendor in the intricate knitting of one of my favorite people. Study the afghan square in the picture. Look at all the possibilities that can happen with two simple stitches. Splendor is all around us.

I walk with my one-year-old grandson. It takes us 45 minutes to walk around the block. He sees splendor everywhere he looks! The “white snow”, the “caw, caw, caw” of the crows, the beautiful yellow fire hydrant, and the yellow school bus. His awe at these things is palpable.

What splendor are we missing?

Messenger

There is a lot of noise in the world. Information is available from all kinds of sources and devices. I hear my grandchildren screaming at Alexa to play them a specific song, to find out the outside temperature, or to get an answer to a math problem. Videos are pervasive – You Tube, tiktoc, Netflix, Prime, Disney +… Along with the videos there are advertisements or what announcers used to call “brief message from our sponsor.” They pop up unbidden on social media or interrupt the You Tube video on how to do a tubular cast on.

Who is curating our messages? Who is the messenger? What is the best way to get our message across to our audience? All good reflection questions.

I like to use knitting as my messenger. That’s where the two hats in the picture come in. I knit them for this couple that befriended my husband and me and convinced us to go to Iceland. We saw breathtaking scenery complete with waterfalls, glaciers, and volcanos. This is where my love of lopi yarn began and I felt it was a perfect way to express my gratitude by sending a message through the hats. I knit each of them a hat with yarn I bought on the trip. The hats sent the message that I cared enough to spend a few hours creating these hats. The best part was getting a note back acknowledging that the receivers were aware of my efforts and my effort was appreciated.

If we want to send a message, sometimes the best messenger is what we do, not what we say.

Offering

I finished the first blanket for Carter’s Care Packages (packages for families of stillborn children). It was hard to knit, not because the pattern was difficult, the pattern was quite easy, but because I kept thinking about the recipient and the painful moment they would have to endure. But, I know firsthand how comforting it was to have a handmade blanket in this situation. I kept thinking about the time the knitter spent making a blanket to cradle a stillborn baby. It was beautiful and I could tell it had been made with care. This is a true offering.

Receiving someone else’s offering during an extremely difficult moment made me realize how much gestures of time and care really matter. There is nothing that can make a person feel better about the loss of a pregnancy but there are things that can provide comfort in the moment.

I always prayed for the recipients of the prayer shawls I knit. Now I pray for the women and their families that suffer this kind of loss. Their vision of the future has to be reframed without the child they anticipated. There will always be a hole in their hearts.

Our offerings are so important in times of grief. The offer to mow the lawn, bring over a meal, knit a blanket, sit and listen, clean the house, do the laundry, and on and on. I find that it’s just better to go ahead and do it. Don’t ask, just show up with the lawnmower or the meal, or the blanket, or the vacuum cleaner, or the clothes hamper and get it done.

Sometimes the most important offering is simply the acknowledgment of their pain.

Everlasting

When I hear the word everlasting, I think about all the things I’m surrounded by that are temporal. As I look around, I realize that all my treasures will someday be gone. So what lasts?

I have been taught and I believe that only one thing lasts – Love. After all, most of us have been exposed to the famous wedding scripture from 1 Corinthians 13: “There are in the end three things that last, Faith, Hope, and Love and the greatest of these is Love.” I embroidered that on a piece of fabric when I was in my teens and it has stuck.

As I age, I become more aware of my own mortality and what really matters. What really matters is our relationships. Our priorities shift as we grow from caring about things to caring more about people. We understand the gift of time and attention. We realize what it means to be truly present to another person.

I was at one of our son’s houses over Thanksgiving and I offered to take my five-year-old grandson on a walk to the playground. He was engrossed in hammering nails into a plank. He said, I don’t want to go to the playground, I just want to spend time with you. So I pulled up a chair and watched him pound nails.

Everlasting is about time, an indefinable amount of time off into the future. It’s something even hard to imagine. All we really have is the present moment but what we do in that moment changes the future. And the love we give in that moment has everlasting consequences. The everlasting gift is another person saying: I just want to spend time with you because our time is finite and the greatest gift we can give.