”Her hands are busy spinning thread, 

her fingers twisting fiber.“

-Proverbs 31:19

"She sat there quietly knitting in the church row, a practice that looked like prayer taking form. She was making a blanket and it was ocean blue. A perfect covering for a woman living in a crisis shelter where the comfort of the Holy Spirit embraces worried and wearied hearts, minds and bodies.  

Her story threaded into words as needles and yarn rhythmically connected her inner world to the outer one. She said knitting helped her do something with the thoughts and feelings she didn’t know how to process. It put them somewhere. She smiled as she spoke, part oracle, part survivor clinging to her yarn like a life preserver

As she confessed, emotion began to well up like a deep swell in the waves that sea watchers know in the Pacific Northwest. The ocean crescendos are nature affirming our depths, our dark deeps with forces of swirl and push that turn expanses of water into breaking and crashing displays of sound and sight. It’s the weeping of waters that draw people into healing trances or cathartic resonance on sandy shores. 

She wove and wept.

That blue sea on her lap was becoming Neptune’s Trident. She was knitting her deliverance, weaving her wounds into a gift for someone. Her pain found a purpose, even if it was a desperate craft born out of a woman afraid of drowning. 

Holy power silently rescuing and restoring life easily overlooked as simple craft that was actually magic and miracle happening right there in the sanctuary.

I witnessed a Proverbs thirty one woman knitting and this is her praise at the gates." 

Eric Blauer, Artist: Marcela Bolívar