patterns
My aunt taught me to crochet when I was young, perhaps 7 or 8. My first attempts at dishcloths and washcloths (the classic crochet beginner projects) were amateurish, to put it mildly. The cotton yarn I had was multicolored, greens and whites and yellows, and the cacophony of color only added to the chaos of my uneven stitches. The foundation chain was too tight; the stitches atop it were gangly, loopy, loose. I’d followed the directions to the proverbial T. I just needed practice.
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I was reading a piece in Image Journal titled “Chaplaincy,” on (you guessed it) the author’s experience as a hospital chaplain. “When I was younger,” she writes, “I thought that even if something terrible happened, we would have some supernatural sense of peace, or angels would come to us in our dreams and tell us that so and so was okay. Or, if that did not happen, we would look up and see a small white bird perched on a tree branch, or we would look down and see a flower.”
I realized that I used to think this, too—perhaps I still do. It’s an easy phenomenon to imagine if you grow up in the Christian faith, if you’re swallowed spoon-fed verses about peace and joy that make you believe things could never get that bad, that you will not be tempted beyond what you are able, that you’ll still see a flower between the sidewalk cracks on your worst day, that you just need to follow the directions and practice, practice some more.