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I've been working on writing a memoir and I'm considering using my 40+ years of stitching as my platform to tell my story. Here's the preface I've come up with so far: A Life Measured in Thread Where did this quiet art begin — this way of stitching words into cloth, of letting thread speak in color and line?
With each pass of the needle, we give shape to thought and let our hands express what the heart cannot always say. Needlework is more than decoration. It’s a form of visual language — where color becomes cadence and motifs become memory. In the 18th and 19th centuries, samplers were more than practice pieces. They were tools of education — moral, spiritual, and emotional. As young girls learned their alphabet, they were also learning the vocabulary of belief. Needle in hand, they stitched the scaffolding of their theology: verses from Psalms and Proverbs, reminders of God’s providence, warnings against pride, longings for heaven, and declarations of hope. These stitched texts weren’t chosen at random. They were catechisms in silk, prayers written in thread — continual sermons that hung on bedroom walls long after their makers had fallen silent into the grave. And somehow, they still speak. Centuries later, we trace those same lines again — not just to preserve the past, but to enter it. When we stitch a verse today, we join a long lineage of women who used fabric as parchment and the needle as pen. Each sampler becomes a kind of altar — not flashy or formal, but imbued with meaning. A marker of remembrance. A place where faith was formed one letter, one flower, one motif at a time. In many ways, my life has become its own kind of sampler — not stitched in linen, but shaped through surgeries, journals, waiting rooms, and faltering prayers. Like those young girls centuries ago, I’ve traced words into fabric — and later, into memory — as a way of making sense of what I was handed, and what I chose to hold onto. My dad — a Navy chaplain with a counselor’s heart — used to say that every life could be traced through five pivotal moments. Five times when the ground shifts beneath you, shakes you to the core, and nothing is ever quite the same again. Moments when God reroutes your path so completely it feels like thunder cracking through an otherwise ordinary day. Five? I never understood how he expected anyone to narrow it down to only five — especially with the way my years were already unfolding. I’m fairly certain I had reached my quota, and then some, by the time I blew out the candles on my sixteenth-birthday cake. For me, those turning points never unfolded like a tidy coming-of-age montage. They crashed in like overlapping storylines from a late-night medical drama — full of surgical suspense, heartbreak, and plot twists that refused resolution. They appeared under the stale, bright lights of operating rooms, in early mornings when my legs no longer obeyed, and in the laughter of a child I was told I’d never have. I was born with a rare form of spina bifida called lipomyelomeningocele — a diagnosis my parents didn’t even have a name for until I was three. In simple terms, it was a tangled cluster of nerve roots and fatty tissue that wound itself around my spinal cord, clinging inside my spinal column like ivy on the walls of an abandoned house. It went unnoticed until I began to toddle, moving in a way that hinted something beneath the surface was off balance. There was no guidebook handed to my parents after the diagnosis — no map, no itinerary, no instruction manual. Just a doctor’s urgency: she needs surgery. And then another. And another. Each one arrived with its own promise to fix everything, as if healing could be engineered with enough persistence. Somewhere along the way, hospitals became their own kind of sanctuary. I learned the language of pain before I learned cursive, memorized the beeping of monitors like hymns. I became fluent in waiting — waiting for test results, for anesthesia, for feeling to return to my legs. It was in that constant waiting that my questions about God began to take shape. If He was real, surely He was paying attention. And if He was paying attention, why did the suffering keep multiplying? But this isn’t a story about diagnoses, disability, or even survival. Those details matter — they shaped me — but they don’t define me. This is a story about wrestling with God and discovering what faith really means when the inherited kind no longer holds. It’s about the legacy I was born into and the one I’ve been forced to stitch together from the fragments left behind. It’s about craftsmanship — the way a life can be pieced together by memory, mercy, and a stubborn kind of hope. There are people who organize their lives by milestones — graduations, marriages, career changes. I’ve had those too, but I’ve also had more surgeries than birthdays, and enough hospital bracelets to fill a scrapbook. So I measure my life a little differently: military duty stations, hospital stays, and stitching projects. It’s how I remember. It’s how I’ve survived. Over the years, I’ve learned that suffering has a way of stripping life down to its essentials. It exposes what you believe and tests the strength of that belief until you see what’s real. It asks how deeply love can root itself in soil that keeps shifting. There are days when living inside this body feels like a full-time occupation — pain as a constant companion, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a thief. But even in those hardest days, I began to sense something steady. Not a miracle that erased the suffering, but a Presence that entered it with me — quiet, unyielding, and somehow enough. Stitching has taught me to see life the same way my father did — as a pattern taking shape through moments I don’t always understand while they’re happening. The five pivotal moments he preached about have become, for me, the motifs of a sampler: pieces of pain and joy arranged into something coherent only when I step back and look through the eyes of faith. Both philosophies — his and mine — are built on remembering. His in sermons and stones of remembrance; mine in linen and thread. Both are acts of faith, declaring: God was here, and I don’t want to forget. This memoir is my sampler — a stitched record of the places I’ve wrestled, wept, waited, and believed again. Each chapter is a thread connecting the child who fought to walk, the young woman who longed to be seen, and the mother who learned to nurture her child without standing. It’s not a story about triumph over suffering; it’s about learning to live within it, to see grace in the ordinary, and to believe that even the unraveling has purpose. When I stitch, I often think of something my grandmother once told me: “Start in the center and work your way out. That’s where the pattern begins to make sense.” I think life is like that, too. We begin in the center — the hard, unexplainable middle of things — and only later do we see how the threads connect. We only ever see the backside of the sampler while we’re living it — all knots and tangles, threads crossing in chaos. But God sees the front: perfect, sensical, beautiful. If you hold these pages to the light, you’ll see what I see now — stitches of faith and fear, doubt and devotion, laughter and lament. Together, they form a pattern of grace. This is my sampler. These are my echoes.
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KarenThis is just a space to share what projects I'm currently working on while I sit and listen to the quietness of the day and the friends I encounter. Archives
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