Not just a city in Rhode Island

I was driving home from work this evening, and I thought of a young man I knew when I was a young woman, and I wondered, What if we had married? Perhaps God brought him into my life to be my husband, but I passed him up. If I had not, I would probably not be living here in Lynden, close to my folks as they deal with their aging issues. ("These golden years suck," was a remark in a recent e-mail from my dad.) I might have children who would be adults by now. When I tried to think of them, I thought, I don't know these strangers. Whoever they might have been, they are not my family right now. Meanwhile, the dear boy who first crossed my mind married someone else long ago and had one or more children. Those children exist, and it is part of God's plan for them to exist, so presumably it could not have been his plan for me to marry their father.

But I remembered Solomon. The only reason he was born was because his parents committed adultery. It was not God's will for David to cheat with Uriah's wife and have Uriah killed. Yet because David sinned, the greatest king in Israel's history was born and became a forebear of our Lord. Every time we screw up, God starts again from that point to work out his purpose.

The grandma who taught me how to cast on and knit.
She also passed along her faith in God.

I think I once heard this idea illustrated as similar to the way a skilled knitter, if she drops a stitch, can pick it up on the next row and weave it into the pattern. I don't know how to do that with knitting. But here are two other knitting examples that I did do.

First, last year I knitted a scarf for my niece for Christmas. At a certain point, I messed up the pattern but didn't realize it until I was further along to a point where I didn't want to unravel so much work. So I completed the scarf with that messed-up section, and, meanwhile, I bought a little loom on which I made some yarn daisies. I sewed the daisies to the scarf to cover the messed-up section and they looked mighty cute. My niece said when she opened her present she thought the scarf came from a store specifically because of the daisies.

More recently I went to a yarn store with a remnant of red yarn from a previous project. I wanted to knit another accessory to match it. But, wouldn't you know it, the red yarn I wanted had been discontinued. So, instead, I bought some charcoal yarn that I thought would look good with the red and planned to use the red remnant for a border and charcoal for the main section. I said to the lady who was ringing up my purchase, "Maybe it will turn out even better because of the new color."

So, no matter whether the choices I've made in the past have been good, bad, or indifferent, wise, foolish, or unthinking, yet from that point on God makes the whole of my life into something better because of it. "He has made everything beautiful in its time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Or better yet: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.... all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (Psalm 139:13, 16).