Well, I’ve recently taken up crochet as a hobby. It’s difficult, it’s challenging, and it’s enjoyable. We need a certain degree of challenge in the tasks we do, otherwise we wouldn’t have any sense of achievement or accomplishment in the things we do, and life would be pretty boring.
However, too much of a challenge isn’t a good thing either, for that’s when we start to get disheartened. So, getting the balance right is important.
So yes, my crochet is full of mistakes, and I’m learning step by step, but that’s fine because I’m enjoying the process. It’s a bit like our Christian life really, each stitch is like a day, some are better than others, but stitch by stitch, day by day, the garment grows, and one stitch leads on to another, and one row, depends on the next, and gradually a pattern emerges. So it is in our life of faith, prayer and reflection, study and discipleship grows, it changes us, we become a new person in Christ.
Saint Paul writes in Galatians 3:27 NIVUK:
‘All of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.’
And again in Colossians 3:12-14 NIVUK Saint Paul says:
‘As God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”
In the final verse we hear how love binds everything together - even when mistakes are made and, in the same way that the stitches are bound together in love, so must we be if we are in Christ.
And, so, when I look at the wool on my crochet hook it reminds me of love, as being the common thread that binds us together in our lives our faith.
So yes, I’m enjoying my crochet, I’m not very good at it, it is a work in progress, a bit like our lives of faith.
God Bless
Lynda