The Quilt Begun Before He Was Born

There are nine women in that kitchen and only six chairs, which is how you know it is a good morning.

The quilt comes out last, after the food and after the cards, and it takes two of them to unfold it because the table is not big enough and somebody has to move the coffee. It is a nine patch, worn colors, nothing fancy. Old shirt cotton and a blue that has been in that family for a long time.

And Ruth, who made it, says the sentence that changes the temperature in the room. She says, I started this the spring your mother and daddy were still just talking.

Everybody does the arithmetic at once. That is three years. The boy in the crib in the next room is nine weeks old. There was no engagement when that quilt was begun, no wedding, no announcement, no name, no anything. Ruth sat down in the spring three years ago with a bag of shirt cotton and started making a quilt for a person who did not exist and had no guarantee of existing, and she has finished it, and here it is on the table.

Dell is holding the far corner. She is forty-four, she came because she has known this family her whole life, and she has a feeling in her chest she is not going to name in this kitchen.

Nobody ever started anything for her. That is the whole of it and it does not need dressing up. No quilt, no name written down anywhere in advance, no chair kept. She has been useful to a great many people and she has been glad to be, and she has arrived at forty-four with a settled understanding that some folks get set apart for something and some folks fill in.

Which is why, when the preacher says holy on a Sunday, Dell has never once thought the word was pointing at her. Set apart is a thing that happens to people somebody was expecting.

And here is a quilt with three years of stitches in it that all went in before there was anybody to sew them for.

You have held that corner. Your kitchen was a different kitchen. But you know what it is to watch a good thing be unfolded across a table and to be honestly glad, and to know, quietly, that nobody ever cut the cloth for you.

Three verbs, and every one of them is His

Jeremiah is a young man when God speaks to him, and the first thing God says has nothing at all to do with what Jeremiah has done, because at that point Jeremiah has not done anything.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.Jeremiah 1:5

Count them. I knew. I sanctified. I ordained. Three verbs, all in the first person, and every one of them sitting behind the word before.

I sanctified thee. That is our word. Set apart. And God puts it at a point in time when the boy had no behavior to assess, no obedience to weigh, no failures to hold against him and no successes to credit him with. Before thou camest forth. The whole of Jeremiah's record, good and bad, is downstream of a verb God had already finished.

You were sanctified before you came out, and the whole of your record is downstream of that. That is the written word and not a comfort I invented on the porch, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line spoken over one frightened young man and lays it across a quilt on a kitchen table.

Now here is the part that gets left out. Jeremiah answers Him. He says, ah, Lord God, behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. That is the disqualifying reply. That is the same sentence Dell has been saying to herself for forty-four years in different words.

And God does not argue with him about his qualifications. He never once says, yes you can, you are better than you think. He says: say not, I am a child. And then He talks about His own decision and His own sending and His own hand. The subject of every sentence He answers with is Himself.

Setting apart is a thing done in advance or it is not that word

Think about what a quilt begun three years early actually is.

It is not a reward for a baby. A baby cannot earn cloth. It is not a response to anything the child did, because the child had not been thought of by anybody but the woman with the needle. It is a decision, made early, by somebody who wanted to, and every stitch in it is the evidence of a will that was operating long before the person it was for arrived to have an opinion.

That is why Scripture keeps putting the word before in front of the setting apart. It is not decoration. Take away the before and you have a reward. Put the before back and you have a designation, and a designation is the only kind of thing that can hold a person who has nothing yet to show.

This is yours, and the stitches were going in while you were nowhere at all. Jeremiah 1 says I sanctified thee with a before in front of it, and the same Spirit who spoke it over a boy is the one making it a present fact in a woman holding the far corner of a table.

Let me be careful, the way I would be careful on my own porch. I am not telling you the rest of your life does not matter. Jeremiah has forty years of hard obedience ahead of him in that book and not one page of it is easy. I am telling you that the cloth was cut first, and no amount of quilting made it his, and no amount of failing would have unpicked it. That is not softer than what you were handed. It is stronger, and it does not depend on your hands.