Life is a tapestry, one God is weaving. When a weaver begins weaving a tapestry it doesn’t look like anything special. The vision they see is often far beyond what any onlooker can fathom. The creator knows every intricate detail and design that will be put into the beautiful piece of art, but the onlooker only sees a few tangled loose strands. There seems to be no rhyme or rule to the way these strands are placed and we certainly couldn’t begin to imagine how to take the first step in creating something beautiful. It looks like an ugly, useless, never ending, confusing piece of work. How we see that unfinished tapestry reminds me of how we often see our lives; useless, confusing, ugly, lost. We often give in to desperation, we feel those constantly tangling threads have no place in this world or in anything that could ever be beautiful. We see ourselves as too far gone, too sinful to be better. We see ourselves as too broken to be made whole, too damaged to be used. We see ourselves as too unworthy to be vessels of something so holy, too unimportant to do something so powerful. We struggle with these emotions everyday, we struggle to see the beauty God sees in our lives.
That ugly tapestry of life that we view as distasteful and useless, is a beautiful work in progress. One that God is weaving with the patience and grace of a master of the art. He is hanging each string so delicately on another and placing each detail of our lives perfectly and smoothly into the next. Every thread works to create a masterpiece. No matter how dull one may seem compared to another, it is beautiful. In fact, the dull threads, the hard times, often teach us more and produce more beauty than easy times do.
As we begin to see these things unfold, the good and bad, we often think we know what God is designing, but then he adds another thread and throws us off. Down on earth we are looking at the backside of our tapestry, all we see are the loose threads, the what ifs, the things that God hasn’t done for us. God is the creator, he is looking down on the work he is doing in our lives, he has the vision, he knows the final product, and he sees it playing out beautifully. Far more beautiful than we will ever know in this life, but one day when our tapestry is finished we will see what a wonderful masterpiece it truly is. We will stand in awe of the God whose creativity and design is beyond all we thought it could be and we will praise the God who weaved our lives into the perfect masterpiece it had become.
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