Knot by Knot

Last week in Lowell, Massachusetts, I was taken to City Hall to see a memorial khachkar, a cross-stone called “A Mother’s Hands”. As I reached up and touched the bronze hands above the cross, my thoughts immediately turned to my grandmother Eva, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide. I remembered her steady, patient hands making needle lace, and how, when I was a teenager, she taught me to lace.

Needle lace is delicate work. It requires patience, attention, and care. You do not make it in one motion. You do it knot by knot, loop by loop, thread by thread. Sometimes you can barely see the pattern while you are making it. At times it looks small. At other times it feels repetitive, hidden, almost unnoticed. And yet, with time, a beautiful design begins to emerge.

So often, this is the way God works in our lives.

We want God to do everything suddenly. We want one prayer, one answer, one breakthrough, one miracle, and the whole picture to be complete. But many times, God works knot by knot. He works through small acts of faithfulness. He works through days when you simply keep going. That is why Saint Paul says, “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart” (Galatians 6:9).

Perhaps you are living in such a season now. You are praying, serving, enduring, and remaining faithful, yet the larger picture is still not clear. Even so, do not lose heart. God is still at work. Nothing offered to Him in faith is ever wasted.

The inscription on that memorial said: “Knot by knot, her hands weave the history of her people.” The history, hopes, and dreams of our people have indeed been woven forward knot by knot. In spite of pain, faith endured. In spite of loss, hope survived.

Friends, we do not need to see the whole design in order to keep moving forward. We only need to place into God’s hands the next knot, the next prayer, the next act of faith, the next day, the next step. And we trust that, in His time, He will bring forth a beauty greater than we can now see.