The scarf: finished, blocked, delivered

The scarf I talked about on Friday is done. Last night I finished it up and blocked it. This morning I wrapped it up and dropped it off with a bag of other things at the Angeltown Food Pantry. Here’s what it looked like when done:


One of the comments on the first post asks

I would, on the other hand, be wondering what God will do with the scarf, but that’s my weakness.

And I have to admit, I wanted to know that too. Because the more I worked on it, the more it became obvious to me that Something Was Up. Too many things started going wrong for me to say “Oh, it’s just a bad day.” Clearly something wanted me NOT to make the scarf.

The first time I did a batch of scarves, I finished the last one on Holy Saturday evening. There turned out to be seven of them. I hadn’t planned it that way: I just made scarves until I felt ready to stop. During that time, I got harassed. Yarn would vanish. Yarn would snap or get tangled up. I’d feel utter futility about finishing the things. I’d reach into the bag and find only one needle. (And the next day, the missing needle turns up in a box of tissues!) I had a pair of size 11 bamboo needles and one of them cracked!

Months later, by strange circumstances, I heard what happened to one of the things I made, where it ended up and who ended up using it, and something big happened to that person because of it. I don’t want to go into more details to protect the person’s privacy (we are on the internet, after all) but it left me in awe.

So why did God want a scarf this week? Well, theologically speaking, God never does one thing at a time. God likes to juggle, so when God can accomplish eight things with the same action, God does it. For example, while making the scarf, I was not wasting time online. That could be one reason. Also, when I dropped off the scarf this morning, I packed the bag with a number of other things they were asking for, so it’s entirely possible that God knew they needed one of those things today and if I brought a scarf, the other thing would get there too.

(Incidentally, there’s a chapel upstairs from the food pantry. I stopped in for ten minutes and prayed for the person getting the scarf, and I could swear I heard amusement from God: I brought all those other things to hide the scarf. Yes, probably. It’s hiding my heart.)

But this gets into some deeper stuff. And that is, during most of the time I made the scarf, I tried to pray. Either for Baby Ted (who has, sadly, passed on) or for the recipient of the scarf, or for other needs.

I learned to bead in order to make the scarf, and on Saturday night, while praying, suddenly the beads became a metaphor for something else, for the “specialness” we give to one another out of our own hearts, for the extras we do to show one another we care. Things about my own heart became clearer to me while thinking about what beads add to a knitted thing. And like I said above, how I hide my heart. Because if I were making a hat for someone who called beads “glittery crap,” I wouldn’t talk about it, but then I wouldn’t bead that person’s hat.

But finally, there’s a woman in Angeltown who’s seen too much ugliness in her life. She’s already relying on a food pantry to feed herself and possibly her kids. She’s cold and doesn’t even have a scarf. Then she gets one, handmade, and it’s got beads on it. It’s a little bit of “pretty” and “care” in a world that hasn’t cared very much for her lately. That’s probably what was going on, and all the rest are extras. Beads themselves, if you will.

My prayer now that the scarf is gone is that I never see it again. I don’t want to know who received it. I don’t want to know if it helped. I just want it to go into the world and accomplish whatever God wanted in the first place, and do it without me knowing.