Liking It Is Not Nothing

Her grandmother's quilt was on the bed in the back room, and it was on that bed for fifty-one years.

Nine patch, mostly. Made out of what there was, which is why one of the squares is from a shirt her grandfather wore to a funeral in 1961 and two of them are from a dress that was cut down twice before it got there. The border was done in a hurry and you can see it. There is one block put in the wrong way round about a third of the way along the bottom, and nobody ever fixed it, and everybody in that family knows exactly where it is.

She used to lie on it in the afternoons when she was small and put her finger on the wrong block and go to sleep.

She is fifty-eight now and the quilt is in a bag in her wardrobe because she is afraid of wearing it out.

And here is what she will not say out loud.

That quilt has done more for her faith than any book she has read. She would be mortified if anybody knew that. It is not doctrine. It is not the gospel. It is a piece of cloth with a mistake in it, made by a woman who never in her life used the word beautiful about anything she did.

But when she thinks about the fact that somebody sat down after a long day and cut squares out of a dead man's funeral shirt and sewed them into something warm, and did the border in a hurry because she was tired, and put nine hundred stitches into it anyway, something in her goes wide open, and what it opens onto is God.

She has decided this is not a real reason. She is a plain woman and she was raised to be suspicious of anything that comes in through the feelings, because feelings are a poor guide and she has watched people be led all over the place by theirs.

So she keeps it in a bag, and she keeps the fact in a bag too.

He put that pull in you on purpose

Let me agree with you first, because half of what you think is right and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Feelings are a poor navigator. You have watched people follow theirs off a cliff and call it guidance, and your suspicion of that has kept you steady for fifty-eight years. Plainness is a gift and yours is real. Nothing here is asking you to become a woman who trusts every flutter.

But hear this, and take it as settled rather than as flattery: you are not being sentimental about a piece of cloth. You have not fallen for something soft because the hard things were too much. That is not my kind way of putting it, it is what stands written in Ecclesiastes, by the most unsentimental man in Scripture, who says God has made everything beautiful in its time and has set eternity in the human heart, and the same Holy Spirit who put that verse in the book put the pull in your chest when you think about those nine hundred stitches.

Look at who is saying it. This is the man who spends twelve chapters saying that almost everything is vapor.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.Ecclesiastes 3:11

Eternity, set in the heart. Not in the reasoning. In the part of a person that goes wide open at a border done in a hurry.

And then the second half of the verse, which is the part that will free you: yet no one can fathom what God has done. The same sentence gives you the ache and tells you plainly that you will not get to the bottom of it. So the fact that you cannot account for the quilt is not a failure in your account. It is written into the design.

This is yours right now, and not once you have found a respectable way to say it: the pull is equipment. Scripture puts eternity in the human heart as a deliberate act of God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been using a nine patch and a wrong block to teach you something no book had the reach to say.

Now hear the difference, because it is the whole thing and it will keep you safe.

There is a world of distance between I feel something, therefore it is true and I feel something, and He made me able to. The first is a bad compass and you were right to distrust it. The second is a report from a faculty God installed, and it does not decide doctrine and it was never asked to.

You have not been in danger of confusing those. You are one of the least likely people alive to confuse those. You just took a good caution and let it grow over a good gift, and the written word says every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, and the Spirit does not withdraw a gift because its owner is careful.