A friend told me her marriage was holding on by a thread. That was awhile back and by the looks of it things are better now. She predicted that they would probably call it quits when the last child left for college but that sun slipped over the horizon three years ago.
As a quilter I have huge respect for thread. The oldest quilts I own are a century old, and are made of unpretentious cotton. The threads that went through the eye of a needle before my mother was born have held hands with each other to keep three generations of sleepers warm and cloaked in beauty.
I go to the fabric store to get my spools but the spider that lives outside my window crafts her own. Although she does not boast about it, hers is five times stronger than steel.* And its resilience increases through the process of being stretched. The protein molecules unfurl in response to tension. The
Darwin's bark spider spins a filament ten times tougher than Kevlar, which stops bullets. Scientists conjecture that the thread from that modest arachnid from Madagascar actually could do what Spiderman did. It could stop a train. **
Rahab dangled a thread outside her window when the spies came to destroy Jericho, and it saved the lives of everyone in her family.
Perhaps a marriage that is holding on by something as slender as Hope is tenacious enough after all. Maybe we are designed to get stronger in response to being stretched. And a family can be saved along the way.
