Hi, this is Joni Eareckson Tada and you’re listening to "Joni and Friends."
Some time ago, I was visiting my friends, Dave and Patti Guth … We’ve known each other for years, and while we were together, Dave was showing me a beautiful hand-crocheted table runner that his wife Patti had just finished working on. It was a really intricate design and I knew it had to have taken hours to make. He held it up in his hands where I had a chance to closely examine the details in her beautiful big table runner. I asked him how long it took Patti to make it and Dave gave me this very knowing look. I could tell a story was coming.
“Well it wasn’t just a few hours,” Dave explained as he turned the work of art over in his hands. “Do you see this little place right here?” And he pointed to a knot way down in the center of the crocheted runner—you could hardly see it. “It was right about here where she made a mistake. I was sitting next to her on the couch when all of a sudden Patti dropped her hook and moaned out loud, ‘Oh no!’ So I said, ‘What? What’s wrong?’ She proceeded to then tell me that she just realized she had made a mistake. She could tell because she was working on a place where the ends of the threads just weren’t meeting like they were supposed to … Something had gone wrong somewhere!”
It then became a search-and-rescue mission to find where she had made that mistake with her hook and thread. It took awhile, but Patti was able to carefully trace back, looking further, back … back until she located the exact point where she had dropped a stitch. And with an –“Oh, bother,” she proceeded (now get this) to unravel all the work that she had invested, all the way back to that mistake. Before the evening was up, she had piled up a huge mound of wrinkled, unraveled thread. She then proceeded to correct her mistake, pick up the stitch, and start the pattern all over again.
Dave shook his head and told me, “You know, most people wouldn’t even notice a little thing like that but Patti would,” he laughed. “With her, it’s got to be right.” As Dave was talking, I kept thinking of something I once read years ago. It was C. S. Lewis who said that when you are made aware of a fault, a mistake, or an error in your past, you’ll never fully correct its implications on your present life until you go back to the point of departure. Isn’t that the truth?!
I’ve had it happen to me, and I know you have, too. You get so far in your life and you realize, ‘Oh no, the threads just aren’t coming together in your life.’ … maybe in a relationship where you become aware that you’ve offended or wounded that person somewhere along the line. You can tell because there’s a wall; the relationship only seems to go so far and no further. Well, we do ourselves (and our friend) a disservice when we merely make a quick mid-course correction and try to move forward as though that takes care of things. No, if it’s a failed relationship; or disagreement; or a misunderstanding between friends or family members; or where it concerns a moral failure, you gotta go back to the point of departure—to the place where you made the mistake. Maybe, it means making restitution, or asking for forgiveness, or paying a serious debt; or even something as simple as picking up an educational degree that you abandoned … whatever. Yes, it’ll involve time and effort and a lot of wrinkled, tangled thread. But it’s always wise to go back and make it right ‘cause if you want the ends of the threads of your life to come together, friend, it always helps to find that place where you dropped the stitch.
© Joni and Friends
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