GOD CROCHETS A RUG ~ A Story of GOD's Design!

Today's blog is a bit personal. It is a story I've been wanting to share for some time. I actually wrote the story years ago, and today I felt it was time to dig it out, edit it a bit and share it with you. Many of you have seen the big crocheted rug on my pictures of my front porch and some have asked about the rugs. I think it's time for this miracle to be published. Some of you likely won't believe it, I had a time believing it myself at first, but remember, with GOD....all things are possible.

GOD CROCHETS A RUG

I happen to love crocheted rag rugs!

My love affair with hand crocheted rag rugs began years ago at a yard sale. 

I was just out for a drive in the country one day when I sort of happened upon a yard sale at the home of an elderly lady who was moving.   

I found a multicolored round rug, which I thought at the time was a braided rug. I took it to my little grandmother who told me it was not braided but crocheted. 

She then told me how women had saved scraps of fabric, cut them into strips and using a double chain stitch, crocheted them into rugs for their homes. She taught me to do the double chain stitch and I began to make rugs from every strip of fabric I could find. I cut up old dresses, shirts and sheets, anything that would work. I bought fabric and planned the color schemes for some, while some just became a collage of prints and colors. These lovely things I could create with my own hands fascinated me and I had them all over my home.

In my first marriage, money was so scarce at times that I would have a yard sale now and then to help pay bills. I never, ever sold my rugs, not because of selfishness, but because they were like extensions of myself, each with its own personality and history. 

However, during one particularly hard time, I did sell one. I decided that feeding my kids and keeping the lights on was more important than hanging on to things. I grudgingly parted with a rug that had graced my kitchen floor.  This rug was in blues and reds mostly because my kitchen at that time was done in black and white cows and the curtains were old feed sack fabric that had blue and red checks and black and white cows.

About a year or so after that yard sale, my marriage ended and my life took a new direction. GOD was with me every step of the way, a great job opened up for me, my mother had an empty mobile home that she let me move into and life went on. Not that it was easy, it was one of the hardest times of my life, but GOD, family and my church family never left me. After a time of being single, GOD blessed me with a wonderful husband who took on the job of helping me raise teenagers and trying to put my life back together.

One day while returning to work after lunch, I passed by an antique sale on the front porch of a lovely old home, so I stopped to see what I could find. I’m always looking for things like rugs and immediately something caught my eye. There, pushed aside, rolled up and so dirty I couldn't even determine the colors was a large crocheted rag rug. I had dreamed of making a room sized rug myself, but somehow never quite accomplished it. I purchased the eight by five-foot rug for $65, took it home and set about the monumental task of trying to clean it. It was way too large to fit into the washing machine, so outside we went.

I draped it across an old metal swingset frame, sprayed it with detergent and washed it with the garden hose. Several times. As the dirt and grime began to wash away and the colors began to show through, something began gnawing at the back of my mind. There was something familiar about the last few rows of that rug.

No way, I kept saying to myself....there's just no way.

I knew that fabric.

I recognized the blues and reds and the designs of the fabric. Unbelievable as it seemed, the last eight rows or so of that huge rug were my blue and red kitchen rug that I had sold at that yard sale several years earlier during the most difficult time of my marriage. I had made the rug out of old dresses salvaged from my grandmother’s house. I had cut strips, rolled them into balls and then fashioned a rug with my own hands with this fabric. You don’t forget something you’ve held in your hands and worked with. Whoever had bought my rug had taken it home, unraveled it and used the strips to enlarge their existing rug. It was definitely my rug!

I considered this a miracle. What were the chances of this happening? I knew there was a lesson in this somewhere. GOD uses everyday things to show HIS direction and guidance in our lives. Each time I walked across the rug, now displayed beautifully on my living room floor, I would ask GOD, why? Why did this happen? HOW could this happen? It’s just too unbelievable. I’m really glad you gave my rug back to me, but really, GOD, this is just too much!

One day, suddenly, it was clear. My little rug represented my life. My life unraveled one day, after years of use and misuse. My first marriage had been unhappy with many difficult years of mental and emotional abuse. When my life fell apart, I thought my usefulness was over. Even though it was more of a deliverance from a bad situation, I still felt like I had failed, like it was somehow all my fault.

Then someone took my little crocheted rug, unraveled it and made it part of a much larger rug, a much larger design.

GOD did the same thing with my life. Even though I unraveled, HE wove me back into a much larger, better life, beautiful, full of color and much more useful than I had ever thought to be.

HE gave me back my rug, but what a difference HE had made with it!

Life doesn't have to end just because your world unravels. GOD knows how to crochet! Don’t give up when things start to unravel,  just put it in the hands of the MASTER! HE’ll fix it for you.

The rug is pretty faded these days(sort of like me) and needs a bit of mending(like me) but it's gracing one of my favorite places, my front porch sanctuary as I like to call it. If you look closely at the large rug, you can see the darker reds and blues from my original rug that make up the outer rows of the rug.

See for yourself. 

Blessings from Patti’s Place to your place!