Devotional Living


            About twelve years ago (really? Twelve already?) I learned how to quilt. My mom quilted and she had been trying to get me into it for a while. I always swore I didn’t have the patience. Then one day I gave it a try and I realized I loved it. Choosing fabric, picking a pattern, putting it all together, and best of all, having a completed project that I made was really something special. I started quilting presents for people. Quilting has become for me more than just a hobby: it is devotional time.
            I recently read the book Desiring the Kingdom by James Smith. In the book, Smith talks about how we are “liturgical animals” – we engage in so many rhythms of every day life that sometimes, we do so unconsciously. The goal of the book is to show how the whole body – not just the mind – is involved in our worship. He talks about how we’re shaped by stories and how art – visual and auditory – help us give meaning to the world around us. I have found this to be true of quilting.
When I quilt, I do more than just sew pieces of fabric together. I think of people. I think of the people who cut the fabric and sold the fabric to me. I think of the person who will be on the receiving end of the quilt (if there is one. I confess, I do make a lot of projects for myself!). I think of my quilting friends and wonder what projects they are currently completing. I think about the colors in the fabric and the patterns. I thank God for the people who have taught me tips and tricks to make sewing a little easier (washi tape to set a margin on your sewing machine? Who knew?!).
I also process my own thoughts while I quilt. As I sit at the machine and run fabric under the needle, I think about what I’m feeling, whether I’m feeling anxiety, joy, or simple contentment. I have quilted when I’m angry about something and it’s calmed me down. I have quilted when I’m really tired and it’s given me a creative energy to keep going. The opposite is true, too: I have quilted when I have a lot of energy and it’s brought me down to a place where I can actually quiet my mind and fall asleep.
Our hobbies – the things we do that we love to do – have a way of crossing time and space to move beyond being just hobbies. In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith talks about how we are what we love. He talks about how the Christian life is more than just knowing God. It’s about feeling God and intuitively seeing the world through the lens of the gospel. Like quilting goes beyond a hobby for me, my faith goes beyond a hobby. My faith isn’t just what I know ::pointstohead::. It’s about what I know ::pointstoheart:: Smith says we feel our way through the world. He writes, “The physical, material stuff of creation and embodiment is the means by which God’s grace meets us and gets hold of us.”* Barbara Brown Taylor (one of my favorite authors) calls it looking for an altar in the world and she wonders, with all the holiness around us, why we don’t have more bruises on our shins** from walking into God’s altars in the world.
Why don’t we have more bruises on our shins?
My mom and I just signed up to a do a block of the month project at her local quilt store. Once a month for 14 months we’ll get together specifically to put our blocks together and at the end, we’ll have matching quilts in two different color waves. Here is an altar in the world to God: that my mom and I can do this together. Quilting – and whatever hobbies you love – can be so much more than just hobbies. In the process of creating, we get to know our creator better.

* Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Baker Academic, Grand Rapids MI 2009 (pg 141).
**Taylor, Barbara Brown. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. Harper One, NY 2009

This is a quilt top I just finished with fabric I bought from the town where I used to live in Illinois. This quilt top makes me think of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met along the way. Illinois and the people there have a special place in my heart.

Comments

  1. JoAnne HerringOctober 8, 2018 at 1:15 PM

    Lovely, I'm sending this to a friend who loves to sew and can't get to it as often as she would like. I'm sure this will encourage her her sewing is so much more than just sewing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not My Favorite Bible Story

I just finished a sermon series on the psalms. One of the passages was Psalm 69, which is a lament psalm that cries out to God for help (“Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.” -Psalm 69:1). It was a tough passage and I told the congregation from the sermon that it’s okay to admit you’re not okay. And sometimes these hard passages in the bible remind us that it’s okay to not be okay.             And then there are passages that just…don’t seem okay. Those passages that you read and think, “Thank God THAT story never comes up in the lectionary!” In an article from 2006, Barbara Brown Taylor calls these the “terror stories.” In her article, called “Preaching the Terrors: When Your Text Is Bad News,” Taylor wrote that the Bible is “a book about a sovereign God’s covenant with a chosen people, as full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders, none of which we may avoid without avoiding part of the truth.”             That hit me in a raw way because I had just
Read more

The Great Social Media Detox of 2018

Image
My iPhone does this new thing where it sends me a message once a week to tell me how much time I spent on the screen in the past week. It even breaks it down for me: how much time do I spend reading, or on social media, or playing games. I’m glad that most of the time seems to be spent reading and not playing, but still. Last week I had a screen time total of 28 hours and 36 minutes. Holy. Cats. I saw a picture that said, “Sometimes you have to disconnect in order to connect.” It was the illustration for an article on why taking a break from screens can be a good thing. The article got into different ways to take a break from screens, including a social media detox. Since I do read a lot on my phone’s Kindle app and use the map app quite a bit, it’s unrealistic to go cold turkey no-screens ever. But a social media detox? Now that sounded like a good thing. I decided I would take a seven-day social media detox: no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram for seven days. Monday I put
Read more

Death and Taxes But Mostly Death

Disclaimer: I know, I know. Who needs disclaimers?  But  this is a topic on my heart today and when there's a topic on my heart after a week of trying to come up with a different topic for a blog post and not being able to, I have to go with what's on my heart. The following is the stuff I've been thinking about. I do not intend it to be morbid...I encourage you to read on thoughtfully and consider where you are in your own thoughts about death.             I am not a fan of those times when my husband tells me that he will most likely die before me. Actually, “not a fan” isn’t even strong enough language for how I feel when he says that to me. Not that he says this a lot: but occasionally, we get on the topic of death and inevitably, this remark will show its ugly face.             My husband and I are both in our thirties and relatively healthy. Neither of us plan on kicking the bucket anytime soon, but death is a reality (just like taxes, I’m told). To that end, we’
Read more