Quilt of Life

The Patchwork Quilt

“Life isn’t given to us all of a piece,
It’s more like a patchwork quilt
Each hour and minute a patch to fit in
To the pattern that’s being built.

With some patches light — and some patches dark
And some that seem ever so dull
But if we were given to set some apart,
We’d hardly know which to cull.

For it takes the dark patches to set off the light,
And the dull to show up the gay
And, somehow, the pattern just wouldn’t be right
If we took any part away.

No, life isn’t given us all of a piece,
But in patches of hours to use,
That each can work out his pattern of life
To whatever design he might choose.”

Helen Lowrie Marshall

Quilting is something that my grandma taught me to love. The putting together of scraps, pieces that many just throw away, to make something with a pattern, something beautiful. And the more I think about it, the more I see God as a master quilter. 

Imagine each and every piece in a quilt is a situation, a memory, a part of a life. There are bright colors and dull colors, happy prints, prints of different seasons, dreary prints. There are the ugly pieces, the beautiful pieces, and the mediocre pieces. Yet every one is necessary to the quilt. The dark and light, happy and sad, dull and extravagant make way into a pattern that only the quilter can recognize. A pattern that is only there because of the contrast in the differences in the fabrics.

Many times while suck in the moment of the ugly of life, it is hard to see why this particular situation needs to be apart of my life quilt, an the temptation arises to ask "why me?". I think about the different quilts I have made. I think about all of the original pieces of fabric that I choose, not because of beauty or design but because of how I thought they would look in the finished quilted design. In picking out the scraps to use for the quilt, the finished pattern is how I make choices for color and design. 

I know that God can take all of my pieces of life and make them not just into the pile of scraps that I currently possess, but into a masterpiece of His design when I choose to hand Him every situation. The times of joy, tears, peace, sadness, excitement, anticipation, fear, love, fellowship, and many more are unscrambled in His artistic hands and placed into the pattern that he has picked out for me and is uniquely mine.