Writers 
WHAT THE WEAVER KNOWS
My grandmother used to weave aso-oke, I don’t think I’ve ever known the exact word for what she did. She would sit at her loom for hours with a thousand colors in her hands, and I don’t think I ever understood why she refused to hurry even when the market-woman next door had already closed up her stall. ‘A hurried cloth tears,’ she would mutter and not look up from her work, her fingers working a pattern into the fabric that she’d obviously known for far longer than she’d known me.
I find myself thinking of her more and more as of late, as I stumble again and again over the temptation to hurry you God. To demand something of you that you haven’t yet provided, to ask of you an explanation for this season of knots and tangles when all I wanted was something that made sense.
You are weaving, I have to remind myself, even when it feels like nothing is happening beneath my fingers. I have been where the cloth ends and seen the jumble of colors that have nothing to do with one another. Only the weaver knows what happens in the making, so teach me patience Father, teach me to trust in the hands that hold the shuttle even when I can see nothing of the design. I don’t need to understand every knot, every pause and hesitation in the rhythm of the loom in order to place my faith in you. You who have begun this good work in me will see it to completion, even if it takes until I’m as old as my grandma.
After all, some of the best things take forever to make. The cloth my grandma wove outlived her, and I think that’s a beautiful thing.
