Thread of Life

I have been thinking a lot lately about hard times.  A couple of weeks ago my pastor preached a sermon about staying strong when you go through trials.   This is something in which I happen to have a lot of experience, but honestly, I am glad I have gone through everything that I have gone through.  God is weaving a unique story with each day of my life.  Throughout my life God has been the thread, the very fiber, woven into the months and years that make up the whole of who I am, and there is no other story exactly like mine.  And that, no one can take away from me.

Just like a tapestry on the wall of a castle can be intricate and beautiful, God only creates quality pieces of work.  There is no trash, no junk, in his kingdom.  The process of making a tapestry is long and tedious, seeming like each thread that joins its mates are not making a difference to the size of the tapestry.  One tiny thread doesn't seem to make a difference, but when combined with thousands of pieces, it creates pieces that can span an entire wall. Each day that has gone by in my life has seemed like a mundane piece of thread, but it is building up to something extraordinary.



The Lord takes such painstaking, mechanical, detailed attention to every fiber of who you are.  I have heard before that when our life seems hard, it is because we are just seeing a small piece of the larger picture.  I believe this.  In weaving, the weaver begins with a picture; a piece of artwork, a photograph, or drawing that will be transformed into a tapestry or fabric.  This is enlarged to the size that is needed for the piece, then is placed behind the loom so that it can be seen through the threads.  The Creator has a masterpiece in mind before your life begins, although instead of a two dimensional tapestry, He is creating a life.  Besides the fact that he created your physical body, which is amazing in itself, the Lord is sculpting an emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimension to you as well.  This goes well beyond the three dimension movies we watch in theaters.  There is so much that goes into who you are.  He has a picture of what he wants you to be right there in the loom of who you are.  However, He is not creating a piece of fabric, but a human who He graciously allows to make its own decisions.

A weaver may have hundreds of colors that go into a single piece of tapestry.  As he is working on it, he may have many of them attached and hanging from the loom while he goes back and forth to create a work of art.  Ten colors over here to create a butterfly, five next to that to create a flower, twenty-three on the left side to make the log cabin, and three shades of gray will make the smoke billowing from the chimney.  Add to that fifty different colors for the scene of the children playing in the field.  The weaver knows where each piece of thread needs to go.  He knows how much of each color and in what direction it should be woven.


At all times, the Lord has hundreds, thousands of threads attached to you just to keep you alive and breathing.  He is constantly creating and re-creating you, all while you are making decisions that could completely change the direction of your life.  But He has a plan for that, too.  He simply re-draws and re-plans the picture and begins His work again.  He is constantly working on you. The most beautiful of God's tapestries are the ones who submit to His will and allow the Weaver to just do His work.  They begin to ask Him what to do in their lives.  Sometimes He needs to undo some sections and re-do them because of bad decisions or things that happen that are out of their control.  Some tapestries need more re-doing than others.  But when the human tapestry submits to Him, they can know without a doubt that it will be absolutely breathtaking.

The hard times I mentioned earlier may just be some of the darker thread that is needed to highlight the brighter areas of the work.  How exciting would an art gallery be if the artist only used one color paint for all of his art? We need the good times and the bad to make us who we are.  Psalm 11:5 states, "The Lord tests the righteous," and James 1:2-4 says,^"My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." I think that these dark  times are refining us and removing our impurities.  If all you can see is darkness around you,  rest in the truth that God has a large view of your life, and he doesn't just see the dark time, but the entire picture.  He loves you and is creating something breathtaking in you.