by Sandy Kirby Quandt

Both my grandmothers and my mother made full-sized quilts. Sissy makes smaller quilted pieces. I have material stashed away that I’ve kept from the seventies in the hopes of someday making a quilt.

Each of those pieces of material I’ve saved tell a story, because each piece was cut from a garment I owned. I even have multiple quilt pattern books for the unlikely day I actually make a quilt.

Well. I did actually start a quilt when Pie was a baby, but never completed it. And I have sewn a quilted top to a bottom with batting in between, but in my mind those don’t count for creating a quilt from start to finish.

Recently, I thought about the fact quilts are made up of individual pieces of varying sizes, shapes, and colors.

Often, as in the case of the quilts my grandmothers made, those smaller pieces came from a larger garment or piece of material.

Those scraps, re-purposed from cloth no longer useful, created an item that was.

By now you may be thinking, “She’s getting ready to draw a spiritual insight between quilts and something.” And you’d be correct. So here’s what I’ve been pondering.

Our lives are made up of individual pieces, just like a quilt. Some pieces remind us of happy times. Some remind us of sad times. Some pieces are bright and colorful. Some are muted and gray.

Those individual scraps of our lives no longer define who we are. They are only a glimpse, a reminder, of who we once were.

However, when we take all those tiny pieces of our life experiences, hand them over to Jesus, and allow him to sew the pieces of our life together into a new creation, we find they become a beautiful, useful quilt.

Jesus re-purposes those events in our past, even the painful ones, that make us who we are into the person he intends us to be today.

Are you a quilter? If so, what part of the quilting process do you enjoy the most, other than the finished project? 🙂

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Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new. 2 Corinthians 5:17 (CEV)

I wish you well.

Sandy

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