THREADS
ABOUT ME
Some people ,who love to sew, keep their spools of thread neatly displayed; the colors beautiful. I have to admit that fabric stores mesmerize me. So many colors. So many
opportunities.
My spools of thread seem to live in chaos. They have minds of their own. Oh, they’re on spools—sort of. But they do like to mingle. On one day it’s all teal and yellow with a splash of coral. Another day it’s greys, deep blue, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a drop of pastel yellow. I even have had moments when every single color twirls and become “knotty.”
My life’s threads have turned into a tapestry. It has become obvious to me that God has been the Creator of all the spools of threads he chose for my life. He chose the colors. He chose what they were meant to be. He chose them for me.
A wacky thread that I got from my father is the gift of puns. Our family would sit around the dinner table and my dad and I would come up with vegetable puns because, when he was born, his family was on a strict vegetarian diet. And when he became older, the family decided eating meat would be okay. But by that time, my dad just couldn’t stomach it—literally. So, he was a vegetarian. However, the rest of us ate meat and also had a lot of vegetables with it.
My mom and grandma, who were both from Cornwall, England, could not see the humor in our veggie puns. Things like, “Peas pass the bread” or “Honey Dew you love me?”—“Yes, but we cantaloupe.” My mom and grandmother were just “plum” not interested.
Some days the hiking threads showed up—deep green, light green, gray, brown, blue, yellow and white threads. My friends called me a mountain goat because I could scurry up a cliff before the others stepped on their first rock. My assertive rock-climbing wasn’t a competition. No, it was a goal to reach the top of the cliffs so I could observe everything that was going on.
As I headed into middle school, I discovered that I LOVED reading and writing. Dictionaries (with etymologies so I could find the history of each word I read) and thesauruses became my best friends. I’d find a way to articulate the plethora of formulated expression I had learned. (Oh, brother!)
But as I grew, some of my threads went haywire. And that led to knots and broken threads, which left me with no way to fix it. And then the most beautiful and strong thread came into my life—Jesus. I had a lot to learn, but he promised he would provide for me.
All of my childhood threads—yes, including puns—came back. I wanted to be a psychologist because I cared about people and could sense their pain—mainly because I had dealt with pain. But after I married Robert (42 years ago), God told me that he wanted me to be a writer. After all, my husband was already a psychologist—and that thread belonged to him. But later I found that I could still help others without having to be their therapist. The pathway I took had God’s fingerprints and inkblots all over it. The people I came in contact with helped me learn how to edit, write things like marketing, contracts, and newsletters; how to be the communication manager in several places; write children’s literature, poetry, curriculum, and just about anything that had words.
And now I have authored something I have wanted to accomplish for a long time. And the sweetest part of it is that there are a few puns, there’s a lot about nature and what I have learned, and above all, God provided the things I saw and wrote about, and he made sure that the meaning of each story was what he wanted me to learn. But more important, I wanted to share it with others so they too could have their own tapestries that God wants to be a part of.
Jesus
the most beautiful &
strong thread