God — Designer and quilt-Maker

I’ve a big birthday coming up so have been thinking about my life and its significance. Am I all the person that God wants me to be? What more can I do? How many more years will He give me? I’m asking all those “old person” questions.

Along with those questions, add to the mix the helplessness that I feel being a care-giver for our granddaughter. She accepts meals, a roof over her head, and art lessons. Other than that, she tries to be independent in the face of many needs and the inability to do so. What can be done for her? What will she accept? I’d like to ‘fix’ it, but realize that even if she were willing, my efforts are not going to help her.

Last night on the way to my church quilting group, I listened to a radio message about the life of Joseph and how, if you looked at the various parts, most of it didn’t look good. However, when considering his entire life, all those parts fit together and made both him and his story quite incredible.

When I got there, to start our evening I flipped open my ‘quilting’ devotional book. The first selection compared the various pieces of a quilt. It said that they might not look like much by themselves, but when joined together, they made a beautiful quilt. That idea was compared to our lives and how God uses all things for our good, to make us beautiful, like Jesus.

This morning I am again taken to Hosea 14. God says, “I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall grow like the lily, and lengthen his roots like Lebanon.”

The author of this devotional guide talks about the frailty of the lily and how that is what people see when they look at Christians, and even if they don’t, that is how we feel as we try to walk with the Lord. We have this sense of total helplessness, but underneath and within is the strength of the cedar roots, the hidden life and power of God. In our weakness, we have His strength.

I know this and teach it, but after three lessons in a row, God is telling me again: when I feel weak and useless, His power is at work in me. Whether others see it or not, or whether I feel powerful or not isn’t the issue. He works in ways that I cannot understand. In fact, He prefers that I feel weak and helpless. That is when He is free to use me. If I’m confident and full of myself, I just get in His way.

To me, my life often looks like a tangled mess of scraps, odd bits of color and thread, and in disarray. I want to sort it out, but am no more able to do that for myself than I am for our granddaughter. Yet God is busy. He is using all that material, including the dark and somewhat ugly patches that are in both of our lives, to put together a couple of quilts.