Wrestling With Chocolates, Fabrics, and a Good Book

I am thankful for having a variety choices, assortments of options, and a multiplicity of opportunities. Am I a spoiled American? Probably. I am thankful for these things but am humbled when I realize that the children at the mission my church helps to support in Haiti, eat the same meal of beans and rice almost every day. There is no variety. Yet these little one are so thankful and excited to have this food which is often their only meal of the day.

Recently I was gifted the ability to make a purchase at a beautiful chocolate boutique. I took my daughter with me and we were so overwhelmed with the amount of chocolates and exquisiteness of our choices that the excursion took a crazy amount of time for the small amount we would be purchasing. Then yesterday I had the need to head to my local fabric store. I hadn't been in about a month and had gone with the intent of purchasing one piece of solid purple to complete a new Lenten stole design I'm working on. But here again I felt like the "kid in a candy shop"...overwhelmed with new colors, textures and patterns. The assortment was as scrumptious to me as what the chocolate shop had offered several days earlier. Oh, the privilege of so much variety!

In the midst of all this I've finally gotten' around to reading The Hole in Our Gospel by Rich Stearns. It's been on the nightstand for several months. The promo for the book reads: Two thousand years ago, twelve people changed the world. Stearns believes it can happen again. I'm glad that I'm reading it in this wintry time where I reside in Pennsylvania because with this title it's lovely to have unrushed reading time. There's so much to think about in this book I just have to take it in small chunks. Many days lately have been so cold, icy or snowy that I'm glad to have a book to curl up with instead of to venture outside into the garden. Those days will come (ahhh....the variety of seasons!)

So I'm wrestling with the fact that there is variety in my life. I am artistically motivated to offer a diversity of stoles at Carrot Top Studio. I believe in celebrating the liturgical church year that allows us an array of visual opportunities in worship. But then I have a book like The Hole in Our Gospel in my lap or I hear about what joyous, happy, thankful people our friends, that have so little materialistically, in Haiti are and this gets me wondering. I'm not sure what path God is taking me with all this. A friend once gave me this card that says, "Work your grief up into art and it is gone." I'm going to trade the word "wrestling" for "grief" and head to the sewing machine to ponder and pray about all of this. 


PS-promise I won't get sticky, chocolaty fingerprints on those new stoles we're stitching! ....and thanks for listening.