Knitting

I'll bet you weren't expecting that good word today! No I have not been sitting in some quiet corner here at Conference knitting. I've been running here and there, finding my seat in the delegation, hustling over to the quorum meeting, stopping along the sidewalks for hugs and updates from people I haven't seen in far too long.

I'm the backup transportation for a small person and her mommy, a twelve-year-old doing his first stint as youth service corps "runner" and a stray Chilean who's bunking in the said twelve-year-old's borrowed bedroom. I'm managing to attend everything I want to or need to, despite all that.

And, oddly, I keep hearing the word knitting. Most recently the MCP of Australia closed the quorum session in a prayer asking God to continue to knit us together. Earlier in the day, in our spiritual practices service acknowledged that before we were born, we were knit together in our mothers' womb.

Knitting is an interesting ancient craft. A single thread gets worked by the knitter into patterns and garments most wonderful and most useful and practical. You can introduce another strand, another colour, even another material entirely, but it must be introduced into that one basic thread. You don't really patch something knitted; the only way to maintain its integrity is to knit it in.

It's an image that keeps coming back to my mind as I'm feeling the connections everywhere. The first days of Conference are especially marked by these connections being made. While it may feel a bit like being in the middle of a giant crazy quilt, patches of colours and patterns and stitches unfamiliar, I'm going to go with the knitting image instead.

I feel the constancy of the single thread, the Master Crafter forming us into a single community, a truly complex pattern moving over and under, building up textures and colour. The possibility exists of a dropped stitch, some unravelling, a tangle that needs to be backed out and reworked but in the end there it will be--a beautiful "whole"!

We don't yet know what will be created, how the finished piece will look, but ask any knitter, the fun, indeed the challenge, is in the knitting. It's that journey thing again! Let's pay attention and watch it happen. It will be amazing.

Posted by Marion