The Heartbreak of Knitting

"Mom, how do I cast off?"
She came over and took the needle from me, the mass of knitted red wool hanging limply from one final strand.
"You do this, and this."
She knotted the thread through the loop and gave it back to me.
"You can knot it again if you want."

It was a weird feeling, standing there holding the work of two and a half months completed in my hands. I've been knitting this steadily, every spare moment I had where I wasn't doing anything else - or sometimes, when I could multitask, when I was doing something else.

It's almost funny, really. That knitting has become a part of me.

It's been knitted on trains, buses, car trips, street corners, in work, on work breaks, in castles, in church meetings, while watching films, babysitting, practising singing, etc.

It's been washed by snow, rain, and my tears before being finished with machine washing.

It's part of my life. I've knitted into it my sorrows, tears, happiness, poetry, love, song and prayers. I've whispered words and thought thoughts and dripped tears into it. For me, it's an incredibly special scarf. So I'm giving it away to someone special.

Life is a piece of knitting. It's one steady thread, knitted and tangled and knotted and dropped and picked up and pieced together and worked on and on. It holds our whispers and our thoughts, our breath and our dreams and our joys and pulls them all together into one. And God makes us into booties or caps or gloves or scarves. It isn't easy. But it's totally worth it. All those tangles to one perfect article.

One day we'll slip the final thread through the loop and cast off and fall into His lap, complete and done with it all. And every single thing we've gone through will be purposeful.

It's kinda funny really. Except it's real. So it's not.