“…that they may be encouraged in heart and knit together in love.” ~Colossians 2:2

We spent a good chunk of our sermon time one Sunday last month throwing yarn all over the Golf Course Road Church worship center. There were ten different colors of yarn, representing ten things that eternally connect us together in our church: the grace of God, the blood of Jesus, the love of the Spirit, the mission of the Church, forgiveness of sin, the promises of God, and others. We held onto all that yarn together so we could both experience and express our inseparable bonds with each other, our undeniable connections.

A couple of weeks later we read together from Colossians 2:2 at the end of a completely different sermon, how we are united in love or, as the older translations put it, knit together in love. I mentioned, almost off-handedly, how cool it would be if someone could take all that yarn and knit a blanket to further illustrate our connections. I didn’t know it at the time, but somebody had already done it!

Melinda Henderson had taken a ton of the yarn home with her that day and had set immediately to work. She untangled all the yarn, which took over four hours. Somehow she managed to get Rex involved–I’m not sure if that added to the time it took or shortened it. They sorted the yarn and organized it into a bunch of brightly colored balls, and Melinda made the blanket!

 

 

 

 

It’s not knitting, she told me; it’s crochet. I told the church this past Sunday, when I showed them the blanket, that it’s not playing fast and loose with the Scriptures to say the Greek word in Colossians 2:2 can be translated “crocheted.” We are crocheted together in love!

This blanket is us. This blanket represents every man, woman, and child in our church and all the ways we are connected by the gracious gifts of our God. All the eternal things, the things that truly matter, the things we call salvation things, the things all of us say are the most important things–we have all of them in common.

We need to be reminded of this. We can’t talk about this enough. This is the truth of who we are at GCR that needs to inform our thinking and shape the ways we talk to and treat one another.

Thank you so much to Melinda for her beautiful gift to our congregation! We’ve already figured out how to frame and display the blanket so that everyone in our church sees it all the time. I hope it’s up before school starts. May it continue to be a blessing and a divine reminder that at GCR we are all crocheted together in love.

Peace,
Allan