It’s the last Sunday of the month. Ordinarily we’d be sleeping in and preparing for some sort of community service. My church sets aside the last Sunday of each month to reach out to our neighbors in service. It’s the pouring out of our gifts and talents in acts of service to those with less than we have. We’ve been doing this for about 2 years now. At first we were fairly rigid about doing it on Sunday. Then we eased up on the day. Now we’ve even eased up on the week. So last weekend (while we were still on vacation) the church helped a single mom move. So, today is a true Sabbath for me. There is no worship service to organize or teach in, and no service worship to participate in. I will rest. I will sew. Hooray!

Yesterday I attended the next to last meeting of the quilt guild board. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. It’s not the next last meeting. It is the next to last meeting that I am required to attend. I’ve been on the board for quite a long time now. Since 2000 I think … I can’t honestly remember. I was President of the guild in 2002. Since then I’ve been the editor of the newsletter, webmistress, I’m organizing the Block-of-the-Month activity for the second time now. Now I’m the custodian of the community service stash and my friend, SizzlingEwe, and I put together kits to make quilts for our community service project. LightHusband has been not-so-subtly suggesting that it’s time to let others in the guild step forward and let their talents shine, reluctant tho they may be. So it was a pleasant change of pace yesterday to hear my quilting sisters echo his refrain as they politely and firmly encouraged me to follow my own muse in the coming year. It’s time, they said, to take a rest. To have a Sabbath.

Many of them will be doing the same. We have all served the guild together for quite some time now. We began as quilters sharing tips and techniques. We have become friends sharing our lives together. We have children at different stages in their lives; one is about to become an untimely grandmother, another is coping with guiding her two teens through the morass of an out-of-control youth ministry, a third has one in college and one about to graduate from high school and her in-laws living with her, a fourth has both children gone and is recently retired from her job of 20+ years, and so on. We struggle together, laugh together, grieve together, cry together, and stitch our lives back together when they have become unraveled. We travel to quilt shows, eat meals, fondle fabric and memories, and through it all remember the timely advice of many quilters gone before us, “If it can pass the ‘man on the galloping horse’ test, we don’t need to worry about it.” This means any flaw, blemish or error that cannot be seen by a man on a galloping horse, is too small to worry about. I think I like that standard.