Resilience: After eating together, Dreamer and I update the blank book we use as a gratitude journal. As we verbalize and record the day’s visitations of grace, our threadbare souls experience modest repair.

We are coping with holes in our lives. Sometimes we feel worn as ancient parchment: our moods uneven, our hopes brittle and thoughts torn.

Back in medieval times, a parchment maker’s knife often slipped while smoothing animal hides for the written word, leaving behind small gouges and tears.

Frugal scribes threaded needles, then zigzagged back and forth, bridging the gap. They redeemed a deficiency with color and texture (see image here).

Raw edges were sometimes sutured, like a heart patient after a bypass.

A gash might be darned, like a sock. Or latticed with parchment strips.

Mid-page in a gospel or treatise, repairs might resemble a doily or dreamcatcher (see image).

Rather than discard the parchment or try to disguise the flaw, patient hands beautified the damage.

Defect as Art.

No matter how riven or riddled we feel, the Living Word keeps tossing us lifelines . . . for every gap, every absence, each gaping wound.

Sturdy, vivid, resilient — grace (and gratitude) mend us.

Let’s embrace each strand, no matter how small:
when we sleep, or kneel, when we mourn with a friend,
reset the mousetraps, scour the sinks,
mask up (or not), re-brush the dog,
make lists, make love, make sincere amends,
recycle, pay bills, exercise,
tithe, take the stairs, sanitize hands,
binge, commute, argue, pray,
zoom, google, sing in the shower,
cha-cha, chop onions, shop online,
change diapers, change lanes,
send faxes, do taxes . . .

Thank God, there’s always one more holy, holistic way to practice resilience.

Where are you torn, and how will you treat the hurt place today?

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Here, a scribe leveraged three page holes to create a laughing face.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: You might also enjoy Crossing the Gap

Hands and thread photo Conor O’nolan on Unsplash.