The Threads Beneath the Mended Quilt

For the believer whose ties to other Christians are all on the underside.

Say there's a woman mending a quilt on her knees on a Thursday afternoon, with the whole of it spread wrong side up across the living room floor.

The top is the part people photograph. Nine patches, a worn blue that used to be a shirt, and a corner somebody embroidered badly in 1974 that nobody has ever had the heart to remove. Friends who visit stand at the edge and say the right admiring sentence.

Underneath, where she's working, the quilt is a different object altogether. Knots. Crossings. Threads carried from one block to the next in colors that match nothing at all. Four small patches sewn over old damage in fabric that doesn't belong to the pattern.

None of the underside was ever meant to be looked at. Every bit of it is load bearing, and the parts that look worst from below are generally the parts doing most of the work.

You have an underside. All your connections to God's people are on it, and you've been standing at the edge of your own life saying the wrong sentence about the top.

You're a member in particular, and the side nobody admires is the side that holds. The Word says that members in particular rather than members on display, and the Spirit works the underside where the weight actually sits.

What People Ask to See

Nobody has ever asked you about your underside. Not once, and not unkindly. It simply isn't a question that occurs to anybody.

What people ask about is the top. Where do you go, who do you meet with, is there a name for it. Those are top-side questions, they're perfectly ordinary, and every single one of them is asking you to display a pattern.

So you've no answer, and having no answer starts to feel like having nothing at all. That step happens so quickly that you've never once caught it in the act.

It is worth slowing down enough to watch it. Between the question and the shame there is an inference nobody stated, and inferences nobody states are the only kind that never get examined.

But a quilt with no visible pattern and a strong underside is warm. A quilt with a beautiful top and cut threads underneath comes apart in the wash. Neither of those sentences has anything to do with how the object looks from a doorway.

You're held by work nobody has thought to ask about, and silence hasn't reduced its strength. Scripture joins the members to each other inside Christ before any pattern is arranged, and the Spirit keeps every crossing in place while the questions ask about something else.

Members in Particular, Not Members on Display

The verse is short, and the tenderness in it matters as much as the doctrine.

Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.1 Corinthians 12:27 (KJV)

Particular is a warm word. It means God hasn't lost sight of which one you are. You aren't a quantity, or a percentage of a congregation, or a name that dropped off a list when the list was reprinted.

Notice too that the sentence is present tense and unconditional. Paul is writing to people who weren't behaving well, and he doesn't make the membership a reward for improving. He states it as the floor they were standing on.

Those words went first to one struggling congregation in a port city, and they reach a living room floor on a weekday without narrowing.

You're known by God as a particular member rather than as a number. Scripture's sentence stands written in the present tense with no condition attached, and the Spirit makes it current on a Thursday afternoon.

The Patches That Do Not Match

Say something about the mismatched patches, because you're probably embarrassed about yours.

Under a quilt like that there's usually fabric with nothing to do with the design. Somebody had a torn block and whatever was in the basket that day, and the repair went in because warmth mattered more than harmony.

Your underside has some of those. A friendship that survived when a congregation didn't. Somebody from a tradition you were taught to be careful about who prayed with you at the worst moment of a bad year. A relative who couldn't tell you what she believes and has never once failed to ask how you are.

You've been treating those as irregular. They are irregular, and they're also holding the weight. The basket was what was there, and warmth mattered more than harmony.

Quilts get judged on harmony because quilts get photographed. Warmth is the only property that matters at three in the morning in February, and it's the one property a photograph has no way of showing.

The same is true of a life. Everything about yours that would photograph well went with the building, and everything that keeps you warm was sewn underneath by people who weren't thinking about how it looked.

You're mended in places by people who don't match the pattern, and the mending holds. Scripture gives every member a part to supply without checking whether it matches, and the Spirit works through hands that were simply nearby.

I Am Not Asking You to Turn It Over

Say what this won't do, gently, because you've been handled roughly about this before.

I'm not going to tell you to prove any of it to anybody. You don't owe a school gate an inventory of your underside. Next time somebody asks where you go, you may answer briefly and change the subject, and nothing here will have been contradicted.

Nor am I saying the people with a beautiful top side are only that. A good many of them have an underside too, and the ones who have been mended know exactly what you're talking about even if they've never said so out loud.

What I want lifted off you is the sense of having nothing. Not the privacy. The verdict.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Nova This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.