The Bow Tie Quilt

It was about 1989 when the community center connected to my church and church school in southern California hosted a service project to make quilts for AIDS babies. The ladies came around to all our classrooms showing us what the quilts might look like and suggesting that both children and parents could work on the project. They would have a Sunday afternoon session, they said, to teach people who had never quilted before how to make a quilt easily.

I was in my late 20's, teaching a multigrade class, and the project caught my eye. So I bought the amount of material they had listed on the handout and went to the sewing room of the community center to take the little 4-hour quilting class. Out of that class came a bow tie quilt of dark turquoise green and white. I was pretty proud of my production. And so I made another one. And another. And when it was time to gather together all the quilts for the ladies to deliver to the distribution center, I think I sent two.

I sent two, because I kept looking at my green-and-white bow tie quilt and thinking, "This is my very first quilt. I might get married and have children, and if I do, I'd like my first child to have my first quilt." So I tucked it away in a drawer, and it went through the next four or five moves with me.

As fate would have it, by the time I got married I was in a different place in life and didn't plan to have children. So one time when Stepdaughter #1 was visiting, I gave her the quilt. It was my effort at passing on the lineage. Even if our DNA is unrelated, I consider Husband's kids to be my descendants, in some way. "It was supposed to be for my first child," I said. "But maybe it can be for your first child now."

Bless her heart, Stepdaughter #1 tucked the quilt away and it went through several moves with her. And this week she pulled it out so that her firstborn could model my very first bow tie quilt.

There come along quiet pleasures in life that are gentle ones, but oh so precious.

Storm Inspectors: A Story and a Metaphor

When we were young, my brother and I were Storm Inspectors. (Parenthetical instruction: you must always hear "Storm Inspectors" with a gravelly, dramatic voice.)

It was, I admit, a self-designated position. Nevertheless, the job was a Very Important One on our island. When a gargantuan monsoon rainstorm came rolling in, we grabbed our umbrellas, slipped on our flip-flops, and sallied forth down the back stairs of our house-on-stilts and out into the storm. Storm Inspectors (Remember: gravelly, dramatic voice) would not sit inside and look out through the louvered glass window panes. Never!!! It was crucial to get into the rain, to walk around the hospital compound with water pouring down upon and through the fabric of our little umbrellas, and to observe from the middle of it what the storm was doing.

Monsoon rainstorms are up to no good. The winds blew so hard that the coconut trees bent hard away from the battering gale. Branches from our jacaranda tree were ripped off and hit the ground. Wet rambutan leaves and plumeria blossoms littered the rain-soaked grass. The gutters flowed fast and hard with runoff water, sending a shrew or two skittering off to find a new hiding place. Palm fronds fell across the roads. We'd clear them away so that our parents could drive in or out from the housing area.

One time the Storm Inspectors--including the neighbor girl Julia--rounded the corner on our little one-lane road just in time to hear the thunder crack simultaneously with a lightning bolt. It struck at a coconut palm about 75 yards from us, knocking the tree off its short roots. The tree fell away from us, landing with a great thump on the lawn behind the hospital cafeteria. It didn't hit any structures or people. But we all stood stock still, rather taken aback as we considered how it might have been a different story had the palm fallen our direction.

As one who has inspected storms of all kinds, I have observed several things. First of all, storms are stronger than you think. They cause damage. They disrupt your life and your living circumstances. You can lose power. You may lie awake worrying. They are the epitome of "too much" in terms of trouble. Too much rain, too much wind, too much damage.

Second, you learn more from storms by living through them, not just watching them. We learned a great deal in our jobs as Storm Inspectors (Don't forget the gravelly, dramatic voice). You can't avoid storms. But while you're frightened or dealing with the "too much" that storms bring your way, it pays to be able to stand outside your mind, so to speak, and to be observant. You learn how the storms affect you, but you may also find that you are developing your own survival skills.

Third, the storm will eventually end. Always. That provides hope, even if the storm has knocked out your power, punched leaks in your roof, deafened you with the thunder, or nearly drowned you with the "too much" of it all.

And finally, a storm will always leave a permanent effect. Sure, you can clean up, dry off, and put things back in their places. But branches or trees that have fallen, stay fallen. Water damage is still there when the storm is over. And if a power surge has fried your electronics, they are still fried even after the sun comes out.

Those are the observations of a veteran Storm Inspector. Over and out.

Love Builds Up

Thistles, Bennington Lake, Oct. 2009Blithely reading along in 1 Corinthians recently during my worship time, I ran across this statement: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." (1 Cor. 8:1)

Okay, I know all about the first phrase in that sentence. But it was the last part that stopped me in my tracks: Love builds up.

We all tend to think of ourselves as loving people. We love our families (theoretically), we love our friends (sometimes better than we love our families), we sometimes love our coworkers. But do we really? Are you really a loving individual? Paul says it clearly in this text: if you're a loving person, you build others up.

Love builds up. That means that all our tactics to manipulate those we ostensibly love, all the times we criticize them, all the times we gossip about them, all the times we punish them in some way when they don't do as we wish, all the ways in which we choose to mistrust them, all the ways in which we take their personhood away by trying to change them to please us ... they all prove that we are un-loving.

Love builds up. Leaving the above-mentioned negative tactics behind, look at the positive side. When you encourage someone, you love them. When you give someone a new tool for success, you love them. When you draw someone close and seek the good in them instead of isolating or ignoring them, you love them. When you verbally appreciate someone else's efforts to do well even if they've fallen short of the goal, you love them. When you look past action to intent and recognize the good there, you love them. When you zip the lip on some sarcastic criticism and instead find something positive to point out, you love them. When you do something to show care for the next person, you love them. (Duh.)

Let's face it, some people are odious. Some are objectionable, offensive or downright obnoxious. It's tough to think of anything you would even want to do to build up those kinds of people. But if you carry the name of Christ on your beliefs, you have a mandate to "Love one another." We try to soothe ourselves by thinking we can do this passively, just sitting back and being magnanimous at a distance. But "love builds up," my friends. You have to be active in this one.

You may, like me, sit back and think, "Oh, isn't that nice. I think I can do that. I shall pat myself on the back that I have built up even some of the most obnoxious, offensive, horrible people around me! I'm good at finding the good." Okay. Whatever. You probably deceive yourself.

Now let me switch your roles on you, as the Spirit did to me when I sat and paid attention to this verse. What happens when I'm the obnoxious, offensive, horrible person? In the sight of a holy God, I qualify fully for that description. As I pondered it, I realized that if love builds up, and if "God is love," then everything God allows into my life has the potential of building me up. In fact, it's not even that passive, if He really is Love. Everything that God does to me is expressly meant to build me up.

Choke.

Do I really believe that? Can I see even the most painful, unhappy times in my life as building up this flawed little child of God? And here's where the obnoxious, offensive and horrible part comes in. I suddenly realized that I have long harbored a deep-seated belief that God is not necessarily going to build me up. That I don't trust Him to be good to me. That I have not believed that He would necessarily grant my prayers for wisdom and the ability to live well in every situation. That I will get torn down on a regular basis. Deep breath.

Love builds up. God is love. Therefore God builds me up. In all things. And in all things, He builds you up, which is why in all things you and I can give thanks. Rejoice in the Lord always, and all that stuff. These aren't just words. They are words from God, who wants us to know it down to the innermost molecule of our beings:

Love builds up. I think about that one.