For some children, it’s a doll.
For others, it’s their thumb.
For me, it was a red-trimmed blanket composed of colorful square patches. The back was blue with white polka dots like little waves peaking gently along the sea.
It was my sleeping companion.
It was the roof for my many childhood forts.
It was my friend around the house, the backyard, and most anywhere around town, too.
Of all the patches on the blanket, I most especially loved the small, unique patch on the back that read, “Made with love by Mommy.”
She had sewn it while pregnant with me.
And, really, that was how my mom loved everybody - she made things for them. Often with her sewing machine.
She made blankets and drapes and bags for friends and customers alike.
For my two brothers and me, she made a lot of Halloween costumes: Cowboy, GI Joe, and Robin Hood attire were among the memorable favorites.
In my early middle school years, she tried to teach me to sew.
Once a week, a few girls in my grade would be dropped off at our house to take sewing classes with my Mom. She invited me to join, and I know nothing would have been more gratifying for her than seeing me learn alongside them.
Two problems:
I had no interest in or patience for sewing.
I was speechlessly terrified of girls from school being in our house. So the whole idea was dead from the get-go as I refused to go into the room where Mom taught.
In the spring of my senior year of high school, Mom made a college sewing kit for me and a dozen of my friends. Each kit had the person’s name written on the top with colorful, bubbly letters done in my Mom’s perfect handwriting.
In her mind, this was an ideal solution to the inevitable lost button or slight fabric tear that would occur during the parentless dorm days.
For me, it was embarrassing.
I had still not learned anything on the sewing front - which meant the kit would sit, unused. With bubbly letters.
Surely Mom knew this, right?
Indeed. For four years, the kit sat nestled quietly in a dorm room drawer.
When my wife and I became parents many years later, Mom’s sewing gifts began showing up in my life with renewed abundance. Her creative joy was limitless when she had the chance to make something for a grandbaby.
During one of her see-the-grandson visits to our house, I asked sheepishly if she could repair a tear in one of my dress shirts. I knew such a request was a reminder that I had never learned to sew.
If she was disappointed, however, it didn’t show. Instead, she let me know that my shirt’s particular tear would not mend well – at least not for very long.
“What I could do instead,” Mom offered, “is take your shirt and use the good portion of the fabric to make a dress shirt for Leo.”
Leo was two-and-a-half at the time, and I loved the idea of seeing him in the same dress shirt as I had worn. She took the shirt, eagerly promising to work on Leo’s version right away.
A few months went by, and I didn’t hear anything on the shirt front. A time or two I asked if she had begun anything on it, and she replied, “Oh yes, I am getting to that soon!”
I wish I had recognized a shift in the manner of her response.
Mom’s voice was ever-so-slightly… off?
Perhaps hesitant?
Maybe unsure?
Something…
At the same time, would it have mattered had I recognized what was going on?
Clarity arrived on Christmas Eve 2018. Mom has brain cancer. Surgery immediately after Christmas. Chemo and all the rest in the new year.
During the chemo treatment days, I would drive from Richmond, VA to Hickory, NC with some regularity to assist.
On my very first visit, I took a moment to peek into Mom’s sewing room. Piles of fabric, spools of thread, and her elegant sewing machine all sat ready, eager, and hopeful for the creative magic of Mom.
When I saw my shirt atop one of the fabric piles, I fell over sobbing. Something deep within recognized that she would never sew again.
At the end of a visit with her four months later, Mom and I were talking – at least in the way one chats with someone whose sentences are about 50% complete.
“Mom, I gotta start the drive back to Richmond.”
She had me wait a moment - she wanted to give Leo a gift. Given her condition, I held my breath because one just doesn’t know what heartbreaking thing might happen next.
With focused, artful precision she wound a fun ribbon with elephant prints around the top of a mason jar, added a dot of glue to hold it just so, and, using a few floral napkins from the kitchen table, created a thoughtful, fun base inside the jar.
She then took a mason jar lid with a thin opening cut into its top and screwed it on the jar.
“Piggy bank!” she smiled.
It was all quite simple, but it was also quite remarkable.
Though her words faltered and her memory worked in fits and starts, her fingers and eyes still knew deep, intuitive truths about how to bring together a creative piece. Honestly, she could have sold that piggy bank at a craft fair.
I would later come to realize, May of 2019 was Mom’s very best month of post-brain surgery life.
A few months after she died in November of that year, I found myself packing boxes for an upcoming move, and I came across the piggy bank jar.
Before placing it in a box, I wrapped it with double the amount of paper I had been using for like items. I then buried the jar in three, solid layers of bubble wrap. I had to keep this one safe.
—
“Bobby, your sermons…” a woman said at the door last year after another Sunday worship service. “I don’t know how to put this, but it’s like they weave…”
Weave. That is a word I’ve heard for years as folks have described to me my sermons, speeches, and stories.
“Bobby, you weave the imagery back and forth.”
“Bobby, you weave the different stories together.”
“Bobby, you weave.”
Not precisely the same thing as sewing, but honestly, over and over it felt like God whispering (and then outright shouting)…
Bobby, you learned after all, didn’t you?
And since recognizing that Voice, I’ve found myself wanting to say back to those who note the weave in my work:
The truth is… that is made with love by my mommy.
—
We rightly and deeply grieve the ones we have lost. While the intensity comes and goes, the grief remains.
And sometimes that grief tempts us to spend our time bubble-wrapping every last gift they gave us. We can’t imagine if their sacred offerings were broken or lost because - as we sometimes think - that is now all that remains of them.
Of course, this is not true. Not at all.
The most fundamental gift they gave us resides within.
And since none of us knows when or how the change-everything-forever news will arrive to us, truly the very best thing we can do is let that gift break wide open and be poured out in love.
Share it boldly, generously, and regularly.
Let it speak love to newborns and make Halloweens festive and graduations memorably colorful.
And know that each time you offer that gift, the world will glimpse one who loved you into being.1
Indeed, it is through a good many people this very day that my Mom still sews.
The world will also glimpse your love… for all eternity. As the ancient wisdom declares: Love never ends (1 Corinthians 13:8).
This one touched me deeply!
Beautiful! Your mom had such an eye for detail when she sewed! You have such an ear for how to weave a story... different mediums... both with beautiful results.