Last Thursday, Kiddo#3 had a mega-meltdown tantrum, and when I finally got him to at least stay in his room, I wanted to do something that would make me appear utterly bored with the histrionics while I still supervised. Knitting is perfect for this situation, so I went for the easiest thing I could think of: four years ago I went through a frenzy of knitting scarves from Bernat Frenzy (the world can sigh in relief: it’s discontinued now) and still had partial skeins of five different colors. I would cast on eighteen stitches on size elevens and knit until I hit five feet. It was the perfect project for someone not paying full attention to either her knitting or her mid-tantrum child, and eleven inches later he finally fell asleep.
I’m lousy at both knitting and praying, therefore I tend to do them together. It’s easy to pray for the recipient of a scarf donation: anyone in a position to wear something I donate to a homeless shelter could probably use anything I could think to pray for. (Also, for Catholics: if it’s eighteen stitches to a row, you can do the Divine Mercy chaplet on the rows: eight for the large prayer and one each for the small ones.)
So there I was yammering at God while doing endless garter-stitch when I explained to God that really, “What this person needs is you, because all of us need you in one way or another–” and then it popped into my head: what if Jesus were to wear this scarf?
My first reaction was: but this is a crappy scarf! I wouldn’t really want Jesus to take this one. I designed it to be warm, to make it quickly, to be a little pretty — but not perfect. If I were making a scarf for Jesus, I’d select a nice yarn, study patterns, look for something special…and probably never get it done. But this? This?
Imagine if the President came to your door and said, “An American citizen needs a scarf. Will you make one?” So you make a scarf and send it to the President, and then the next time you see him on TV, he’s wearing your scarf. It’s just a little daunting.
And yet Jesus tells us that anything we do, we’ve done to Him. I was a little unnerved by the idea of Jesus meeting me in Heaven one day, wearing this lousy but warm scarf.
At any rate, I finished in time to send with Kiddo#3 when his class made sandwiches for the homeless this Sunday.
I made it wide and stretchy so if necessary, the user can pull it up to cover her ears and chin at the same time.
Kiddo#3 said he’d wear it this way, though:
No word yet on what would Jesus wear.
Now see, I really like that scarf! I’m betting Jesus would thank you for thinking of making it warm and making nice chunky blocks of color. It looks fun.
I think Jesus would have liked it better had I made the color blocks truly random in terms of size, or all the same size. I had a hard time guessing how much mileage I’d get out of each of the remainder balls.