The Quilt Top Is Pieced And That Is All

It is folded. It is not in a bag, because you would not put this in a bag.

It is folded, with something over it, on a high shelf, and every square in it came out of her house. The dress she wore to your cousin's wedding. That apron. The blue that was on the back of a chair for about fifteen years. You cut all of it up with her scissors and you pieced the whole top and it is beautiful and it is finished.

And then it stopped.

Now, the honest reason is not what you have been telling people. You have been saying you got busy. And you did. But that is not why the shelf has stayed a shelf.

The reason is that the top is pieced and the quilting is left, and the quilting is where a person can ruin something. Every stitch goes right through the fabric she wore. And your stitching is not fancy, and your lines wander, and the thought of putting your ordinary hands through the middle of that has been enough to keep it folded for a long time.

Somewhere along the way it stopped being a quilt.

It became the last thing your mother is going to be part of. And you cannot get the last thing wrong.

So it sits up there, safe, and not a quilt, and not on a bed, and not warming anybody, which is the one thing every single piece of that fabric was doing when she owned it.

They strengthened their hands for this good work

There is a night in Nehemiah where the whole thing turns, and it turns on a sentence about hands.

The walls of Jerusalem are down. They have been down for a long time. And Nehemiah goes out in the dark and rides around the rubble by himself first, which I love, because he looks at the whole ruined thing before he says one word to anybody.

Then he tells them. And here is what happens.

Then I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me; as also the king's words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good work. (Nehemiah 2:18, King James Version)

They strengthened their hands. Not their qualifications. Not their standards. Their hands, which is what people build with, and which is what people quilt with.

You have ordinary hands and the written word says ordinary hands are what God strengthens for a good work. Nehemiah 2:18 is where that is put down in plain language, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it out of a ruined city and into a room with a folded quilt on a high shelf.

And notice what Nehemiah told them first. He did not tell them how skilled they were. He told them about the hand of God which was good upon him.

You were never the strength in this, and it is already settled that the good hand belongs to God and not to your stitching. Scripture puts the hand of my God before the hands of the people in Nehemiah 2:18, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that order right when a woman starts measuring herself.

A quilt is a thing that goes on a bed

I want to say something to you gently, because I think it needs saying and I think nobody has said it.

That fabric spent its whole life being used. It was a dress at a wedding and it got sat on. It was an apron and it got flour on it. It was on the back of a chair for fifteen years, and things got put on it, and the sun faded one side of it, and none of that was a tragedy. It was a life.

The quilt is not more holy than the dress was.

You are allowed to put a needle through it, and heaven has never once treated an ordinary thing as too precious to use. The written word has God strengthening hands for building rather than for preserving in Nehemiah 2:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word ruin out of a woman's mouth about her own stitching.

And here is the thing about your wandering lines. They will be visible. Somebody in fifty years will hold that quilt up to the light and see exactly where the quilting got tired.

That is not damage. That is your hand in it, which is the only way your hand gets in it. The quality of the quilting is not a measure of what she was to you.

You have permission for crooked stitching, and this is yours to make rather than to guard. Nehemiah 2:18 calls it a good work while the wall is still nothing but rubble, and the Spirit of God is the one who calls a wandering line a good work too.

Twenty minutes, and do not unpick

So this is the whole assignment and I am not going to grow it.

Get it down. Unfold it on the bed. Thread a needle and do twenty minutes of quilting, anywhere, wherever your hand lands.

Do not plan the pattern first. Do not mark it out. Do not decide which block deserves the best stitching. Start somewhere in the middle where nobody will look, if that helps, and go.

And whatever you do in those twenty minutes, do not take it out. Not tonight, not tomorrow. The first stitches will be worse than the ones you do in six months, and leaving them in is the point.

You are covered while your hand shakes on the first row, and Nehemiah 2:18 is the ground under that. The hand of my God which was good upon me comes before any of the building in the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a bedroom at nine at night with a needle and a folded top.