predator

We are on the hunt. Tracking skills are being honed, foreign territory is being covered with ever increasing familiarity and efficiency, and it is only a matter of time before we rustle that illusive new home out of the bushes where it hides.

There are several ways in which to snare a home in its natural habitat. Some believe in the shotgun approach, rushing in with all options blazing, rooting through everything and anything that doesn't move, shooting off offers left and right and hoping one of them sticks. Others methodically plan out their strategy before they deploy any attack, mapping out specific locations and likely scenarios for success, hesitant to leap in without doing a thorough recon first. Some sit back in a comfortable chair in the hunting blind and wait for the real estate agents to fetch and bring in the game.

Dean and I do things in different ways. He is a man of action. I like that about him. But when he, and then we start to depend on our own efforts to accomplish something that God intends us to trust him for...well, we just wear ourselves out.

I spent most of the time at church on Sunday night crying. My heart was so heavy. As a few friends surrounded me and prayed for me, I realised that I was trying to carry some burdens that I was never meant to take responsibility for. I am just not big enough to bolster up all these people I love or make their challenges mine. Neither can I make the perfect house appear by staying up in the wee hours of the morning searching the Internet or driving around for days in the neighbourhoods I would love to end up in.

While I was sitting there filling tissue after tissue, God showed me a picture. I am a knitter. I knit garments and webs of grace. Sometimes, it doesn't seem like I am doing enough, so I lay aside the knitting and put in some hard work, sweating and groaning and feeling like, yes, this will accomplish something. And I turn around to see the grace has unravelled while neglected, and at the end of all that grunting and groaning and running around, I have come away with nothing but calloused hands and a case of fatigue. So I am going back to the knitting. I am knitting a huge pillow of grace to sit on. I am clicking my needles, constructing a large fortress of grace around myself and Dean to protect us from all the stresses in our lives at this time. I am making a web of grace large enough to stretch beyond what we can see and strong enough to catch everything that God wants to send our way.

I am the knitting predator.

These are the rather large talons of an eagle at the Ecomuseum in Montreal.