Hooked on Him

Which do you feel less threatened by: a needle, or a hook? I personally am beginning to embrace the hook. For those of you wondering why Caroline is so interested in pointed objects, I will clarify: I have officially traded in my knitting needles for a crocheting hook. Now, I know, you are all asking, "But Caroline, what will become of your ridiculously wide scarf?" Don't worry, dear readers, but allow me to explain.

When last you heard of the plot of my scarf, it was coming along very slowly, but had a great hope for its future. Well, since then I have become increasingly busy with other housewife-type activities like baking, and the knitting was banished to the far corner of my bookshelf. Every now and then I would consider retrieving it, but then I would remember that it was so very ridiculously wide, and any motivation to work on it would fade. You see, the scarf had grown to a point where it had lost all hope of every becoming a scarf. It was well on its way to becoming a blanket, but certainly not a scarf. So yesterday I pulled it off the shelf and gazed at it for a long while. I came to the conclusion the best thing to do would be to just start over, and with a sigh I began to unravel it, reducing my large knitted swatch into a ball of yarn. As I was doing so my dear friend, who is quite gifted in the area of crocheting, suggested to me that if I had such difficultly knitting, perhaps crocheting would be an easier alternative. She offered my a crocheting hook and a quick lesson and soon my new and improved scarf was underway!

I will tell you, my darling readers, that I was amazed at how very right she was. Crocheting was so simple! So quick! Why, with my new and reasonable width, I was well on my way to a completed scarf in no time! So after a few rows I stopped asking her to check and make sure I was doing it right, confident that I had mastered my new skill. In fact, just to show how much I had mastered my new skill, I counted the stitches. I was about to prove that I was no longer making this scarf wider with every row.

I counted.

I counted again.

I sighed.

Well, the scarf was not getting any wider. However, in the five rows since I had stopped asking for help I had lost precisely five stitches. At this point I contemplated giving up and just offering the yarn to someone more gifted. If all of my knitting was doomed to grow far too wide, it seemed my crocheting was doomed to fade into nothingness. I soon realized my problem, overconfident, I had stopped paying attention to one step she had assured me was tricky but essential, the final stitch in each row. My heart leaped! I knew what the problem was! That meant I could fix it! So armed with this new awareness of the dangers of missing the last stitch I dove back into my crocheting and watched as the scarf, now remaining a consistent width, continued to develop. I am fairly pleased to inform you that it is now coming along rather well, in my humble opinion.

As I was looking through the Bible for what God might have to say about this little scarf-making adventure, I came across this passage in Jeremiah 18:3-6, "So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the LORD came to me: "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?" declares the LORD. "Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel." For this new scarf to be made, I had to pull the old one apart; the shape it had taken was wrong. But through the act of unraveling it, something much better was able to be formed. This is much like how God deals with our mistakes. When there are parts of us that are not right, he can pull them out and make something so much more beautiful than what would have been. I know he can do amazing things when we choose to let him unravel the imperfections in our lives, and so I can't help but trust him to do it. He is God, after all.

Truly His,
Caroline