My life has been a tapestry of rich and royale hue…

Tonight in our Grief Share class at church we talked about how many of us have questions of why painful things happen to us in life, and why our loved ones had to die.  God doesn’t owe us an explanation for why He allows suffering, but it’s OK that we still ask the why questions.  We have to be careful when we ask, “If God is really good, why did He allow this to happen?”  This question denies His sovereignty and says that evil might yet win.  God is trustworthy and good, even when we can’t understand that or when our narrow circumstances tempt us to think otherwise.  The Gospel is proof of God’s goodness, and we must never forget that God made the ultimate sacrifice of love by giving His son’s life on the cross as substitutionary atonement for our sins.  You can always trust the man who died for you, and we have to trust God in the midst of our why questions.

One of the people interviewed in the Grief Share video shared the following poem:
The Master Weaver’s Plan (Unknown Author)
My life is but a weaving
Between the Lord and me;
I may not choose the colors–
He knows what they should be.

For He can view the pattern
Upon the upper side
While I can see it only
On this, the under side.

Sometimes He weaves in sorrow,
Which seems so strange to me;
But I will trust His judgment
And work on faithfully.

‘Tis He who fills the shuttle,
And He knows what is best;
So I shall weave in earnest,
And leave to Him the rest.

Not ’til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.

The dark threads are as needed
In the Weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.

It made me think of my husband’s cross stitch art (don’t make fun of him – he is an amazing, meticulous  artist! See his work above.) and how the back side of it looks very cool, but you can’t really tell exactly what it is from the underside unless you know what you’re looking at.  It’s a mess of jumbled strings going every which way, and it looks pretty chaotic sometimes.  If you were to look only at the underside, you might miss the beauty on the surface, the side upon which the artist looks.  This is much like our lives. God sees the portrait from the surface of the canvas while we sit behind it wondering what it will look like as a finished product.  We may not understand why God has us tilt our heads this way or that, or why we have to sit so painstakingly still sometimes, but in the end it will all be made clear.  We may not understand why we keep getting painfully jabbed with a needle if we are the canvas, but in the end all the pain produces beauty. In the end it will all make sense, but for now we are called to trust the Master Artist to do His work as He sees the beauty.  He sees our lives in the light of eternity, and He sees perfection and beauty.  It’s really hard for me to believe that all of this pain could be beautiful, but I trust that it is so.

As with almost everything in life, all of this reminded me of a song.  I sang Carole King’s Tapestry in middle school choir, and I had no idea what the words meant then, but I liked them.  Now as I read the lyrics, I think of Joseph, especially because of her reference to the coat of many colors.  And to me, Joseph has always symbolized Jesus.  The lyrics talk about the man coming to take her back as her tapestry unravels, except I think our tapestries don’t ever unravel. Our lives are not for nothing in the end.  If I believed my life with all of its pain was for nothing, I would not still be here. I would not be able to handle all of this pain with no hope of things unseen, no faith.  My faith is not a crutch, but a hopeful endurance of my present sufferings.

Tapestry
By Carole King

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue,
An everlasting vision of the ever-changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Once, amid the soft, silver sadness in the sky,
There came a man of fortune, a drifter passing by
He wore a torn and tattered cloth around his leathered hide,
And a coat of many colors, yellow, green on either side

He moved with some uncertainty, as if we didn’t know
Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go
Once he reached for something golden, hanging from a tree,
And his hand came down empty

Soon within my tapestry, along the rutted road,
He sat down on a river rock and turned into a toad
It seemed that he had fallen into someone’s wicked spell,
And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn’t know him well

As I watched in sorrow, there suddenly appeared
A figure, gray and ghostly, beneath a flowing beard
In times of deepest darkness, I’ve seen him dressed in black
Now my tapestry’s unraveling; he’s come to take me back
He’s come to take me back