Bridget Vogel
My Mom is an avid crocheter and makes incredibly beautiful things. You name it, she will find a pattern and create something awe-worthy. I grew up watching her work with a varied collection of yarn. Some skeins were easy to work with, wound nearly perfectly. Sometimes that yarn looked good on the outside, but, as she would go to pull more from the bundle, she ended up hooked with a tangled web of cotton that was somehow upset there in the middle.
Some days are perfect. They’re easy-going, life is wonderful, you and God are on the same page. But then other days, you find a knot, a tangle, a mess that you didn’t expect. The thing about knots in the yarn is that you must often stop working on the thing you’re trying to make to sort them out. There is a process of placing your work down to figure out a solution.
The more I realise how my mind is a tangled mess of problems I cannot solve, the more I learn that God is the only one to sort them out. I think he looks at our lives as multiple projects all sourced by multiple metaphorical skeins of yarn. We may work in one area, or on one character challenge for a while and then hit a knot in the yarn. The problem that I have, and maybe you can relate, is that once I find a knot, I often want to quit every project and focus on fixing it myself.
But I think God says, “hey, I’ll sort this one out for you. Just set it down for a moment, go over to another and keep working. It will all come together!”
Paul, in Ephesians 2:10, says that we are God’s “workmanship.” We are one big tapestry of issues and beautiful qualities, of challenges and attitudes. Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we fail; neither of those outcomes mean we should give up. God has something amazing in mind for each one of our lives when we take part in his process of creating this incredible work.
From watching my mother crochet, I learned that you don’t get something beautiful if you let a couple of tangles stop you. We have to let God work out the issue and continue on the journey.
When we happen upon the knots in our lives, remember:
1) We don’t have to sort them alone (Romans 8:28).
2) If you believe in Jesus, you’ve already overcome because His power dwells within you (Romans 8:11).
3) We know that when God begins a good work in us, He is faithful to complete it (Philippians 1:6).
God has a great, beautiful, masterpiece of a plan in store for you. Let Him untangle the knots.
Be encouraged: He has it all under control.