{knots}

Just around the time I got pregnant, I picked up knitting. I'm not sure how and when my fascination with knitting began, but I suddenly had this incredible urge to knit stuff.

It was quite a process getting started: many afternoons J would come home to find me tangled in a ball of yarn on the couch, determined to figure out a stitch. I watched videos, read books, solicited lessons from my mother-in-law.

I was amazed to learn that knitting is, essentially, the art of tying knots. A hand-knit scarf is just hundreds and hundreds of tiny knots strung together.

A week from today, Avram will celebrate his first birthday. How is that possible? In many ways, it seems like that magical day I saw him for the first time was actually decades, centuries ago. Another lifetime. But it also feels like it was just yesterday he was trying solid food for the first time, or starting therapy, or sitting up on his own. He has magically transformed from a little slug baby into this tiny person.

This has, hands down, been the best year of my life. How could I have possibly known how much love my heart could hold for a small, stinky baby? There are millions of moments from the past year that I wish I could have bottled up and stored away to have forever.

But at the same time, this has been the hardest year of my life. I have never cried so hard, worried so uncontrollably, feared so deeply, slept so little. We have become well acquainted with doctors, hospitals, health insurance customer service representatives, medicines...emergency rooms.

I am trying to believe that the worst is behind us, that there are good things before us, that this year has only left Avram stronger and his future brighter...his story richer.

I am choosing to believe that the hundreds of tiny knots, the twists and tangles, are being woven into something beautiful; that they are not the whole story. When a blanket is hand-knit, every inch of thread has to pass through the knitter's fingertips, and I am choosing to believe that not one second of this past year has fallen from the Knitter's hands.

It may seem like chaos and pain to us now, but I  am choosing to believe that He is taking all these knots, all this mess, and knitting us into something beautiful.

"If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dan, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, 'Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,' even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You.

For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well."

Psalm 139:9-14