Ezekiel 27:26-27
Your rowers have brought you into great
waters; the east wind has broken you in the heart of the seas. Your
wealth, your wares, your merchandise, your sailors and your pilots,
your repairer of seams, your dealers in merchandise and all your men
of war who are in you, with all your company that is in your midst,
will fall into the heart of the sea.
There is the reference to the repairer
of seams in the NASB version. Other versions refer to shiprights and
builders. But we will go with the repairer of seams. Also mentioned
in 27: 9, the old men and the wise were repairing the seams in the
boat or the sails, knowing that if the weak spots were not repaired,
the whole thing was going down. And we all know that the same thing
can happen with cloth.
There are 3 types of seam failures. I
just finished repairing 2 antique quilts for a lady. They showed each
types of failure. One form is where the stitching thread breaks. This
is actually the easiest to repair. The thing holding the 2 pieces of
cloth together breaks, but the fabric itself is not damaged. The line
is usually obvious where the repair can be made. We just need another
thread that will hold things together. These failures usually come
because of stress on the seam when the quality of the thread is bad.
Like our lives, we can have stresses that pull on the fabric of our
lives. That which is not of God is weak and the strain makes us snap.
The seam slowly begins opening up, and without repair, will continue
to enlarge a hole in our lives. Sometimes other seams may have to be
opened up to lay flat the one that needs to be repaired, and then the
opened seam can be sewn shut and if done well, no one will ever see
that there was ever a problem. God is like that. He can take the
place of the old, brittle beliefs and notions of our lives and
replace them with His strength when the things of the world cannot
hold up. He can handle it. He might have to do some unsewing to fix
the problem, but He can repair all of our holes.
Then there is the shallow seam. The
thread was sewn too closely to the edge of the fabric and the stress
placed on it causes the edge of the seam to unravel. This is a much
more serious problem. That thread which is to hold things together
is right and true, but misplaced. That quarter or 5/8 inch seam was
not sewn correctly and leaves a weak spot which eventually can be
breached. Sewing on the original line again will accomplish
nothing.The solution here can be more tricky. If the seam was
supposed to be deep, taking the regular seam around the weakness can
solve the problem. But if the seam was narrow to start with, placing
the original seam can be just as hazardous as it has just become a
narrow seam like the one that unraveled. Whole pieces may have to be
picked out and replaced, and then requilted. This process is far more
time consuming, and unless you have kept pieces of the original
fabric, it will be hard to make the piece look right. The patches may
be obvious, but at least the quilt is still useful. We can be like
this. We are inconsistent. We run life out of alignment and a little
too close to the edge. And we fray and unravel. If this is an
occasional problem, the repairs are sometimes easy and sometimes
obvious, but we can be fixed and used. If the seam was consistently
shallow, there is nothing that can be done to strengthen the seams.
Some fabric may be able to be salvaged and used in another quilt, but
this piece is only good for sitting around. Any stress will pull it
apart. Repairs are futile.
And then there is the worst failure.
That of rot. These quilts were from close to the turn of the century,
and there is a characteristic of most quilts from that era. The black
fabric disintegrates. It rots away. There are parts of it there, or
there are shapes that show that there was fabric there once, but it
is gone now. The batting is exposed, the fabrics around it make it
obvious that something was supposed to be there, was once there, and
has not held up over time. If there was little of the offending
fabric in the overall quilt, new patches can be appliqued into place.
Sometimes old fabric can be salvaged from another quilt or fabric
collection, but more often than not we don't have that available.
Reproductions or close matches can be put into the holes. But if
enough of the quilt was made with fabrics that were inherently
flawed, like the chemicals used to dye fabric black back then, the
quilt will become worthless and unrepairable. It might be set aside
sadly, folded as a memory, but it will not be able to be used for its
intended purpose. But if there were only a few pieces used, the holes
can be filled with time and different fabric and a lot of patience.
These quilts were examples of that.
One's edges had been used and abused to the point that I had to cut a
whole row of blocks off and rebind it. The center of the quilt, away
from the edges, was in quite good shape. The other seams and patches
that had worn down were patched. Seams were repaired. Useable fabric
from the cut off portion was salvaged from the cut off edge and used
to replace rotted or abused spots in the quilt. With the new binding,
that quilt became useable again. The second one had more of a
disintegration problem. There was need for far more patching, more
applique over rotting pieces. The edges had to be rebound as well,
but the quality and age of the fabric showed that it was not original
to the quilt. There were far more narrow seams where the patches
frayed. It was a work that I wanted to save, but the more I patched,
the more I realized just how fragile this work was. It was returned
to the owner with a note that this piece had to be handled with care
not not hung up or used. It was just for show and memories. There
were seams that couldn't be patched, but were not serious enough to
deal with or were so tenuous that working on them would probably
cause more harm. I really began wondering if it was worth my time and
her money to have taken this second piece on. And that is how it is
with some broken lives. We question God for investing in them when it
seems He will get no real reward for all of His trouble.
But that is our God. He looks fondly on
we old quilts and though the world puts no earthly value into us
(when you look for value of quilts of that era, they are worth little
to nothing on today's market), He sees us as precious, as worth it.
He paid for us with the blood of His Son, washed us up, patched our
fragile, worn and torn seams and patches, and either uses us or puts
us on display as examples of His extreme mercy. And for that, we well
up in extreme gratefulness. We will be damaged by this life, but God
is our good repairer of the seams, wise in His dealing with us,
knowing where we need reseamed, patched, places covered over, or
parts cut off to stop the bleeding. He then knows where to put us to
display His glory. It may be on the bed, on the wall, or in a case or
closet, but we are His precious treasure. And we need to love each
other, repairs and all, as fellow possessions of the King. We need
not judge each other's frailties...we have enough of our own. Some of
our repairs don't show up to those who see us, but we know that we
are just as likely to come to need for repair because of what we were
originally made of, who sewed us together in the first place, and how
closely we were quilted. The workmanship we received was not of our
own doing. Pride is foolish as we did not make ourselves. But our
Master Repairer mends us all when the use and abuse of life takes its
toll.