(This blog authored by our friend and colleague, Kim Lee)
I’m not very handy.
My great-grandmother made granny-square quilts and my great-aunt knitted and crocheted sweaters, scarves, mittens, and blankets. And while they both garnered their patience and spent precious time teaching me their well-honed skills, I never really took to them. Albeit, there was this one year I made up my mind to make something with my very own hands for my grandmother’s Christmas present. The winner? A framed, cross-stitched saying:
“Grandmothers Always Have Time.”
To the untrained eye, my grandmother wasted her precious time or at the very least used it impractically. She spent hours playing Old Maid, Go Fish, and Double Solitaire; singing and dancing in the living room to the likes of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, The Andrew Sisters and Louis Armstrong; rewashing the dishes after I’d “washed” them; punching holes in the lids of jars for my menagerie of lightning bugs, lady bugs and preying mantises; and searching the yard endlessly for the ever elusive four-leaf clover.
In all four gospels, a woman (unnamed in Matthew and Mark, dubbed “a sinner” in Luke, and called “Mary” in John) pours an entire alabaster jar of perfume on Jesus. The gesture is considered a shocking waste, an impractical use of a precious resource.
Long after my grandmother died, I was sitting on her sofa one afternoon staring at the wall where my cross-stitched gift for her hung when I noticed that the “m” and “e” at the end of the sentence were considerably larger than all the other letters, rendering the saying as:
Grandmothers Always Have Time.
To the untrained eye, it may have appeared as if I had shockingly and impractically wasted those extra stitches. And while it is true that I did not intend to make those letters larger than the others, I did come to see those letters as the truth: My Grandmother Always Had Time for Me.
Thanks be to God for all those who flagrantly fling out shocking and impractical gifts.