Mostly Brave

“Life doesn’t always go as planned; it goes better sometimes.”

                                       – Larissa Grace Anderson

My mother-in-law is a quilt maker. She made a quilt for each of our three children when they were born. She even made a quilt with all my father in-law’s neck ties when he passed. I am not a quilt maker, but I can respect the work that is put into each quilt she creates. The map for our life is just like a quilt. We make plans for what we want it to look like. What will be the size and design? What will be the purpose of it?

We believe the plans we make will pay off in the end and our finished quilts will be something to be proud of. If we are disciplined enough, we will save a lot of money. If we exercise, we will be in great health. If we marry well, we will live happily ever after.

We plan how many kids we want to have and determine what kind of people we want them to be. What will we do as an empty nester when our kids are all grown up and finally go out on their own? We pay into our 401(k) so we can plan our retirement and we even plan our own funeral.

With all of the planning that we do, we can only see the backside of the quilt in the making, the ugly side, the side that shows stitching in disarray and doesn’t make any sense but at the end of our life, when our quilts are flipped over, we will see our lives in its entirety.

We will see that we grew from one swatch to the next and learned more about who we were along the way. We will see a life that our creator stitched together carefully, to make us who we were in the past, who we are in the present, and who we will be in the future.

I spend so much time worrying about why my life has so many ups and downs, and if I’m not careful, I can let the good things in my life pass me by while I am worrying. I try to control the making of my quilt and then get disappointed when my plans don’t play out the way that I want them to, when really, I just need to realize, the control of making my quilt was never in my hands to begin with.