R.L. Wilson @ATRI 2020

Never underestimate the value of a good foundation! I’m a crafter. My preferred craft is crochet, but I’ll entertain other options from time to time. When I was younger and had better eyesight, I loved to make doilies out of very fine thread with a very tiny hook. If you’ve ever made a doily—or have one that your mother or grandmother made, you’ll notice that they are very geometric.  Typically a section of a few stitches is repeated several times on each round, with every round building on the one(s) below. If you have made a mistake on a previous row, you may find yourself having to rip out hours of work to fix that mistake before you can go forward. That’s frustrating, but necessary!
Every crochet project begins with the foundation row or round. And getting that foundation right is critical. If you have too many or too few stitches, if you have miscounted or misunderstood the instructions, you may find yourself redoing that foundation several times before you can finally begin to build on it. Get the foundation right, and your chances of getting the rest right go way up. Get it wrong, and you may be tempted to scrap the project; to just give up.
Where am I going with this? It occurred to me a few years ago how much crochet is like the Christian life. You have the pattern (we’ll equate that to Scripture), the hook (I’ll call that the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of everything [Jesus] told you” John 14:26), and you have the raw material of your life (the yarn or thread). Throughout your life as a believer you must use that pattern, as it is applied to your life by the Holy Spirit, to help you shape your life (yarn) into the kind of person who truly reflects the image of God.