Threadbare

I curled up on the couch, wrapped in the quilt my grandmother made for me as a child.  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it felt like to hug her or hear her little chuckle.  I looked deeper into that little house that no longer stands and remembered her pulling cobblers out of her oven.  I could almost feel the wood stove's warmth in the living room, along with the icy cold water that came out of that one bathroom faucet.  Her house was humble, small, and yet the place where many of my earliest memories came to life.  She made apple butter outside in the big kettle, grew delicious strawberries, and made simple quilts.  She was a tiny woman but one of the strongest women I think I will ever know.  I never got to have one adult conversation with her.  I lost her much too soon.  I was just a teenager when I stood at that podium overlooking her casket and sang solo to the loved ones gathered in her little church:

"My heart can sing when I pause to remember, a heartache here is but a stepping stone. Along a trail that's winding always upward, this weary world is not my final home." 

I couldn't possibly feel the full weight of her loss then, but I ached just the same.  I called her Grandma Richmond, and I knew she knelt by her bed every single night on her knees in prayer.  She always began with the Lord's Prayer and then spoke her own words.  She wore glasses, and her hair was always pinned at the back of her neck the same way my entire life.  She loved card games, keeping things clean, and braiding hair so tight your eyes couldn't blink.

She was widowed and a single mother for many, many years, raising ten children.  My mother was the next to last child she birthed.  She didn't drive, but she could grow a garden.  She didn't have a job, but she never stopped working.  She wasn't extremely affectionate, but she had a soft smile.  I knew so much about her, but there is so much I will never know.  But I have her quilt, and the hundreds of hand-stitched lines from her very fingers wrap around me all these years later.  It's a little threadbare, but that makes it softer, sweeter.

 "The things of earth will dim and loose their value.  If we recall, they're borrowed for awhile. And things of earth that cause the heart to tremble, remembered there will only bring a smile."

Time is a funny thing.  It can make your heart grow calloused and bitter, or it can soften, letting warmth and love leak out everywhere.   I could store my memories in some forgotten closet.  I could forget the words and promises of that hymn.  I could question why all the grief and tragedy.  I could look at all the brokenness a life experiences and allow my heart to form itself into stone.  Or, I could place the broken stories, tears of grief, exhaustion of living into the hands of my God and watch Him make an heirloom of my threadbare, quilted story.

I wrap tighter in the warmth, the memories, the knowledge that her blood runs through me.  I think of her tenacity and grit to survive and how those traits were passed to my mother that passed them to me.  Next to the strength of my grandmother, the other strongest woman I know is my own mother.  The woman who buried a child and still found great joy in life.  The woman who trusted God to take her from the hills of a forgotten hollow into Spain's mission field.  The woman who taught me how to work hard, think of others more than myself, and recklessly trust the Creator of this world with every fiber of my life.  The woman who raised more children in her home than she gave birth to; children all over the world.

I look at this quilt, and I see a story, God's redeeming story in every stitch in time.  Oh, there is so much sadness, so much toil and heartache that is weaved over this little piece of quilted love.  A lineage of imperfect women weaved together by blood and DNA.  I feel their strength pulsating through my own heart to keep leaning in, even in the most worn places, to the hands of the Master to keep telling His story over a life, my life.

And in the worn places where it is tempting to curl up and hideout, I remember I wasn't patterned to quit.  My lineage is one of strength and determination.  My lineage trusts God in the hardest places and still finds deep joy in His good gifts.  The arms before me taught me how to let my heart of stone become a heart of flesh in the Hands of God.  The arms before me taught me to carry the load and full weight of the life that has been gifted to me and not to waste even the smallest scraps.  They both taught me that the smallest scraps make the prettiest pieces in this heirloom, threadbare quilt.  It's in the wearing, the becoming, the being loved, and giving of love, that the deepest meaning of life springs forth.  Being threadbare is a gift, a gift of giveness.

"But until then, my heart will go on singing.  Until then with joy I'll carry on.  Until the day my eyes behold that city, until the day God calls me home."

And when I get there, I aim to be utterly threadbare.