The Deacon's View
The Parable of the Ratty Blanket
(What follows really happened. Jacob is a real boy, though I have
changed his name. He is not one of our
grandsons.)
What became for me a personal spiritual journey of
discovery began when I agreed to fix Jacob's obviously well-worn baby
blanket.
Jacob was then a precocious ten-year-old. The blanket had become
something he probably wouldn't be caught dead with in public. For the
most part it lay, half-forgotten, in his room. If Jacob had been two
years old instead of ten, his parents would have bought him a new
blanket. If he had been four, they would have had it mended, but
clearly that had been done many times. That I was asked to repair it
now was probably his mother's idea, not his.
The blanket had no discernible shape. It was more hole than whole, and
it was ratty. My challenge was to salvage it without changing it too
much; Jacob knew the feel, heft and colors of his blanket, and was
perfectly content with it in its current condition. He just wasn't
quite ready for it to disappear.
I took the blanket home and gingerly laid it out on the floor of my
study. Over the next few weeks I looked at it, felt it, carefully
lifted it to see how it had been made and mended. Jacob's mother had
added purple and blue polka-dotted patches of dinosaurs, which had once
roamed proudly across the blanket but now lay helpless with heads
missing and tails long gone. The original flannel was now a colorless
gauzy fabric, some of it no more than frayed wisps. Clearly, the
project was hopeless. But I couldn't quite bring myself to pronounce it
DOA.
One day I sat on the floor next to the blanket and began to dissect it
as carefully as if it were a specimen in a biology lab. Some of the old
fabric simply fell away. But under the dinosaur patches I found intact
fabric that held firm. Over the next few weeks I restored both the
front and back, but the blanket remained extremely fragile and its size
was diminished. I then added a piece of soft flannel as filler, so that
the whole thing held together but still was limp, as it had been before.
By now I was six weeks into the project, and still not quite through. I
was surprised at how important it had become to me. I really wanted
Jacob to accept the result. I hoped he didn't know I was fixing it, and
that his mother would just put it back in his room so it would be there
waiting when he looked for it.
And that is what she did. I do not know if Jacob needed his blanket
after that, or if he ever noticed its smaller size. Perhaps if he did,
he also noticed the tiny new heart sewn onto one of the dinosaurs.
The carpet in my study is now free of small wads of ancient batting and
raveled-up flannel. Other projects are underway. But sometimes I find
myself thinking of the unexpected journey I embarked upon when I began
to mend that worn-out blanket. The experience gave me a glimpse of the
way I think God works in my life--patiently, taking care not to violate
who I am. At the same time He takes that which is falling apart or
shabby and gently heals it, not by replacing it with something brand
new, but by exposing that which had been there all along, hidden or
forgotten. Afterwards, I look pretty much the same, outwardly. But when
I grow very still, I know that I am more alive than before, and that I
have been touched by love.
-- The Rev.Gay Blundell