The Baby I Was Making It For Is Nine Now

She was born in the spring and you started it in the January.

You remember that clearly. You remember choosing the color, and you remember the first evening, and you remember thinking you had months. And then she came early, and there was a lot going on, and the blanket got to about two thirds and stopped.

She is nine now.

She has opinions about music. She has a school bag with something on it that she chose herself. She is not a baby and has not been for a long time, and every single year that has gone past has made the blanket further into the past and harder to pick up.

Here is what I hear from a woman in this exact place, and I have heard it more than once.

It is too late now. She would not use it. What is the point of a baby blanket for a nine year old. It would be strange to give it to her now, and stranger still to explain why it took nine years, and so the whole thing is finished before it is finished.

I want to take a run at that, because there is something underneath it that is not about wool.

The lateness has stopped being a fact about a blanket. It has become a fact about you. You are not late with a gift. You have become, in your own mind, a person who is late, and the blanket is Exhibit A, sitting in a bag where you can see it.

And a woman does not pick up Exhibit A. She avoids it, which adds to it.

The years the locust ate

There is a promise in Joel that gets quoted a lot and I want to look at what it actually says about time.

Joel is speaking to a nation after a locust year. Not a bad harvest. A stripped land, where the thing that grew was eaten down to nothing, and the loss was real and nobody was pretending otherwise.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. (Joel 2:25, King James Version)

Read what God says He handles. Not the harvest. The years.

He does not say He will make up the crop. He names the time itself as the thing He deals with, which tells you what He thinks the real loss was, and it tells you He is not embarrassed by lost time the way we are.

You have a God who takes lost years as His own business, and Joel 2:25 is where that is written in plain language. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries a word spoken over a stripped countryside and sets it down beside a bag of wool in a house where a child has turned nine.

And notice something about the tone. There is no scolding in that verse about how the years came to be eaten. He names the locusts, He names the years, and He moves.

You are not being asked to account for nine years, and it is already settled in Scripture that God speaks about eaten time without one word of blame. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been the only person keeping the record.

Do not start a new one for a new baby

Here is where the well meaning solution goes wrong, and somebody has probably suggested it.

Start again. Start one for the next baby in the family. Fresh wool, no history, nobody knows.

I understand why that sounds like the answer. It solves the awkwardness. And it will not work, because the awkwardness was never the problem. The problem is the story that you are a woman who is nine years late, and a fresh blanket cannot touch that story. It only gives it a second exhibit.

You have permission to finish the one that stopped, and this is yours to complete rather than to replace. Joel 2:25 restores the years rather than issuing new ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes going back possible for a woman who only knows how to start over.

And the other thing. Nobody has to receive this blanket. Not this month, not ever. Finish it and put it in a cupboard if that is what you want. Finishing it is not the same act as giving it, and you are allowed to do one without the other.

You are able to finish a thing without handing it to anybody, and heaven has never once tied the completing of a work to somebody else receiving it. The written word in Joel 2:25 speaks of restoration without naming a recipient, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a second decision off a woman who is stuck on the first.

Twenty minutes on the row where it stopped

So here is the whole ask.

Get it out tonight. Find the row where it stopped, hook still in it or not. Work for twenty minutes.

Do not count what is left. Do not lay it out and estimate. Do not go back and check whether your tension has changed, because it has, and finding out at the start is how the bag goes back in the cupboard.

Your tension nine years on will be different. There will be a visible line across that blanket where the old work meets the new, and anybody who knows the craft will see exactly where the gap was.

Leave the line in. Do not undo back to it. That line is the truest thing in the blanket, and the evenness of the stitching is not a measure of the woman who made it.

You are covered while the join shows, and Joel 2:25 is the ground under that. The written word restores eaten years without pretending they were not eaten, and the Spirit of God is present in a front room at nine at night with a bag and a hook.