Last week I got a phone call telling me where it was. I lost track of it a long time ago, but am happy to discover that it is only fifty miles away. The project never should have worked. My presumptuousness surprises me even now. Thirty-four years ago, I got the bright idea to coordinate a quilt to give to the retiring bishop and his wife. I was a novice quilter, never having taken a class or joined a guild. The theme was stories from the bible. This was before the internet, so contacting parishioners from congregations around the world involved paper and stamps. I mailed packets of fabric and instructions to willing participants over the next few months, trying to avoid five portrayals of Noah's ark. There were also four inch cornerstones with flowers, to include children and people less inclined to fill a large block.

 

Then they started coming. One of Jesus holding a lamb was incredibly tender. Moses kneeling by the burning bush conveyed reverence. Isaac meeting Rebekah for the first time was like a tapestry. Somehow I assembled eighty-one big and a hundred small squares, and the journey to be quilted began. Women who knew their needles left their white thread in curving arcs along the sashing and border. Many signed their names. 

 

We had a friend who offered to photograph it. This was simple enough when trying to capture individual blocks or even groups of four. But he puzzled over how to include the entirety of its grandeur in one frame. I think he climbed a very tall ladder. 

 

Yet something is sacrificed when we reach for a wide angle. Our eyes are ill-equipped to appreciate the texture of the bed by the woman who has just given birth, or the netting that spread over Jesus as He was baptized. I can tell you about it, and you can squint to look for it. But I doubt that you will gasp as I did when they were in my lap.

 

Ironically, the opposite is true as well. Gazing closely at the handwork is marvelous. But it pushes aside the breadth of the whole quilt. 

 

I suppose life is like that. I can zoom in to appreciate the tiny stitches God makes in my days, the moments that bring color and texture. But that close view cannot also encompass the whole. For that I need a ladder. 

 

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55