Third Person Thursday

Back in December she won a raffle for a handmade quilt.

She emailed the quilt maker with some colors that she liked and told the quilter to surprise her with the end result. Every few weeks the quilter would send an email updating her on the progress, until last week the quilter told her it was in the mail.

When she opened the package, her breath was taken away. The quilt was gorgeous. The colors were perfect. The size was perfect for snuggling up in on a rainy (or not so rainy) day. The thickness and weight were exactly what she wanted. If she had been there in person, picking out fabrics and laying out the pattern, it could not have been more perfect. (In fact, it probably would have been worse as she tends to get overwhelmed with color choices and design schemes and so forth.)

It reminded her of another perfect quilt that is no longer with her. That quilt was made by her grandmother. It was a crazy patchwork, with no rhyme or reason to the color or fabric selection. It was on her bed from the time she was 13 until the time it was lost in a move at the age of 22. She wept over the loss of that quilt. She knows it seems silly, crying over a quilt, especially one that was starting to get worn and threadbare with use. But she doesn't care. In the eleven years since it went missing, no other blanket has ever felt as good as that quilt did.

She knows that quilts are often used as metaphors when people are speaking of feeling the Holy Spirit at work in your life; warm, enveloping, conforting. It's a good metaphor, she thinks. The arrival of this new perfect quilt just happened to coincide with some crazy deep soul searching she had been doing. She thinks she'll spend some time wrapped up in love, just as she did so many years before.