One of my great pleasures in life is to be able to sit down in front of the TV or next to an audio message, or even at a restaurant or in a waiting room and CROSS-STITCH! I have a new one on the go. Bigger than the last one I did of “Granny”. I wrote about that as well…
Mike’s Mom, aka Granny in her early 20s
I have been asked in days gone by ‘why?’ Why do I like immortalizing photos in thread? It is SO time consuming. My time is worth so much more. I guess the same can be said of prolific readers – while reading, they are not making money, but they are being transported into another world. Seeing life through a different perspective and enlarging their horizons without going anywhere.
I find a lot of value in cross-stitching.
I am creating a beautiful work of art, yet I am not creative.
I feel sublimely artistic, yet I cannot draw.
But those are surface feelings. There are deeper more meaningful thoughts that come to mind when I have needle in hand.
Life slows down when I take up my WIP (Work in Progress). It stills me. You cannot rush this hobby. I have time to think. So often, I see each tiny square upon which the stitch will sit, as a period of time. The picture is like an entire life. It has a beginning and it has an end. Each of us are a WIP. As with our lives, there are easy parts of the cross-stitch pattern which unfold simply and easily. Then there are tough parts that take more time to sort out. They are bitty, time consuming – they could even be described as tedious and difficult, but they must be done to complete the picture. They will get done and easier parts are ahead. And so it is with the seasons of our lives.
I think one of the things about cross-stitch over which I marvel the most in its parallel with life is the underside. It’s messy and hardly recogniseable. Life can become a shambles. The loose threads of emotional turmoil, struggles and difficulties hide the creating of a perfect picture. The layers of thread intertwined mess up the image that is being created….
But on the other side, things look good. It’s all taking shape….
But it’s not the whole picture. You can only see part of it and quite often the part we do see doesn’t make sense. It may even look a bit out of shape or the colours all wrong. We are seeing it too close up and not from a distance where it will all fit together perfectly.
The Creator knows the other side of our lives. He sees our perfect picture unfolding. It’s not the whole picture, because it’s not yet finished. There is more to come. It’s being built day by day, moment by moment, thought by thought, word by word. It’s why we have to trust the Creator each minute of our lives with each aspect of our world. In trusting and believing God, the picture of our life will be complete in the best possible way.
If you are going through a hard time, there is a bigger picture. You just can’t see it yet.
And it’s definitely not yet complete. There’s more to come.
Proverbs 3:5 & 6
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.”
No wonder I love cross-stitching – such amazing life-parallels.
Keep the smile going.
God bless you!
In His Grip,
Helga xx 🙂