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8
May
2020
During my wife’s last calendar year of life, she knitted a prayer shawl a month.
You may not be familiar with prayer shawls. Some are square; some triangular. Joan’s tended to be about five feet long and two feet wide, knitted with the warmest and softest wool she could buy. (The wool shop was always glad to see her!)
In the days when we could still gather for worship services, our congregation periodically held a blessing of prayer shawls. Every person either laid a hand directly on a shawl, or on someone connected to a shawl.
People have different understandings of the efficacy of prayer.
Regardless, I have no doubt that those shawls carried with them a sense of warmth and comfort to people who needed both.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: knitting, bad news, comfort
3
Apr
2019
The news has not been good recently – unless you’re a Trump supporter. The media have been filled with incidents of hate, violence, death, and disaster.
The world is still reeling from the mass murders at the mosques in New Zealand. Followed by the copycat defacing of five mosques in the U.K. Where Brexit seems headed for disaster, taking Theresa May with it. And disaster aptly describes typhoon Idai’s effect on Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi.
And that’s not counting an endless parade of house fires, vehicle accidents, thefts, and political conflicts.
I admit to contributing to this flood of bad news. Ironically, journalists focus on bad news precisely because it’s an exception to the norm. It is news because it is out of the ordinary.
So we hear all about the accident where the bus full of young hockey players collides with a semi-trailer whose driver failed to stop at a stop sign. We never hear about the thousands of trucks, every day, that do stop.
Tags: Trump, bad news, Brexit, Mozambique, Princess Diana, joy