Back when I was, maybe, 9 years old, my grandmother taught me how to knit. I imagine many of you could tell a similar story. We were on a family vacation at Chincoteague – a quiet, small town beach with wild horses running free. But in the afternoons, we had quiet time and my grandmother said she wanted to teach me how to knit. Clumsily holding the needles, I tried very hard to do what she showed me. The basic stitch – the knit stitch – goes around like this and down like that. Pull through and “voila!” you have a stitch.
I was not what you would call a “fast learner.” I struggled, dropped stitches, asked her to show me over and over again. By the time we got to the end of the row, she taught me the purl stitch. The purl stitch is really just the knit stitch backwards, but to my eyes, it seemed like a whole new beast to contend with. So, I struggled, dropped stitches, and asked her to show me again and again. By the time I reached the end of the row, I had a pretty good purl stitch going. Then she asked me to do a knit stitch for the next row and my mind went blank – as though I’d never heard of or seen such a thing in my entire life. I can’t tell you how many hours or how many days my grandmother spent patiently showing me the two most basic stitches in knitting.
But the thing is – once I got it, I had it. It’s been with me ever since and will stay with me all my life. My grandmother taught me how to knit a cap based on the Red Cross pattern. For decades, every afternoon, she would sit in her comfortable chair in her living room and knit these hats for charity. Together with her church, the hats were shipped all over the world to people who were cold and could not afford to keep warm. My grandmother has since died, but her work lives on. It would not be possible to lay out all the things that she made and show them to others. Her gifts, the work of her hands, include what she has created, what I have created. It goes back to all the women in our family who took the time, who cared and crafted so that others could be warm and safe.
This is what I think about when I see Tabitha’s friends weeping over her death. For her friends, it’s not enough that Peter knows that she was a good person who helped people. It’s not enough to know that she was faithful. In the room with her body, the women had laid out tunics and clothing that she made. With the same reverence that they cared for her body, they showed him this part of her legacy. These clothes were something special. And I would guess that they weren’t special just because their friend made them or just because she gave them to the poor. I would guess that they were well made, extraordinarily beautiful, easily betraying that she believed that no one deserved the bare minimum. Rather, what they wore could show the world that they were loved, that they were valued.
Indeed, in the Roman Empire, your clothing was one of the big things that told the world who you were, how much respect you deserved, and how you should be treated. Through these gifts, she likely blessed them with a better life than they had before. She was devoted so that love and faithfulness shone through in everything she made. This question of devotion shows up so many times in our lives, doesn’t it? It’s so wrapped up with what we choose to do with our lives – with our sense of purpose. We want to follow God in all that we do.
