Storage by God

Okay, I went back on my word. I'd once said, “That’s a good number to quit on” when I finished my 500^th patchwork baby blanket of a three-year effort.  These I had donated to three local hospitals for “special needs,” mostly impoverished families with little or nothing for their newborns. The recipients were not known to me, though a nurse friend told of giving one to a crying woman who came in alone to deliver her 5^th baby.  Because of a language barrier, nurses assumed a difficult family situation and unwanted baby. Others went to homeless families.

When I first started, I thought making fifty baby  blankets was a stretch.  I didn’t count on God’s storage containers.When word got out of my project, He opened the trap doors at the bottom of the “supplies elevator.”  From what people gave me or I found for a pittance at yard sales or thrift stores, the project kept growing. My “goals” reached 100, then 250….well, I’m now at 519 and have the raw materials for three more. One thrift store is especially dangerous for me; they get a lot of fabric from estate situations.  While my husband browses for books (he likes to donate quality children’s books to schools), he leaves me alone to dig through the fabric piles.

On one recent trip through farmlands, I had to smile when I sensed an analogy between my “blanket ministry” and the grain storage towers along the route.  I thought of that famed verse (used for many tithing sermons) from Malachi 3:10:

“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.  Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”
Malachi was right about “not have room enough for it.” We live in what’s called a “starter home,” meaning small, about right for a couple. We raised two children in it and now it’s full of grandkid play stuff and books. I don’t have the luxury of a sewing suite, so the supplies get stuffed under beds or tucked behind my clothes in the closet. Having little storage means I sew the blankets up as quickly as I can.

Oh, the ways people “supplied”! One woman I met at a yard sale gave me four bulging garbage bags of flannel scraps from dozens of pajamas she had sewn (I think as a business).  I had to piece them, but seventeen baby blankets resulted.  Another time I found two garbage bags full of fabric scraps left at our house. A third woman delivered boxes of fabric she cleaned out from her quilting hobby.

I think God grinned as He poured it out. As I neared my 500^th blanket, I learned that other seamstresses had taken up the cause. As though He was removing this “ministry,” both the compulsion and supply eased up, except for a few from time to time.

My sewing skills aren’t anything famous. But I’ve learned God can even use the lesser-skilled for assignments that you’d say “no way!” if God wasn’t in it to prod you on and pour down the materials.