process joy

I have a confession for you – buried deep within me there lurks a closet perfectionist. Even if you are fairly close to me – you may have never noticed her. She often hides behind my laziness so that she can’t be seen, but from the shadows she often whispers like thunder about all of the things I am not precisely good enough at. She tries to paralyze me with her mummers.

Since I am very human she has a large arsenal of things to chose from, because like everyone around me I never get anything perfect (which is something you have surely noticed even if you only know me through the interweb). What I have learned though is that as I find joy in the process it is harder to care about her observations – no matter may be.

As I am working on this quilt, learning all sorts of things about what I should do differently next time I am finding this process joy. I can see the ways in which my layout is weak and needed more finesse – more forethought. I can see how I really should have taken a lot more time in the very fist step of cutting and early piecing. I can see how irregular and unshapely my quilting stitches are. But this is how we learn, how we grow. We push past our early attempts laced with ignorance so that if flashes of brilliance break through we are in a position to embrace them.

But I can not live my life waiting for those flashes of brilliance that may never come. I can embrace the joys of the process. When you look at life as a whole, process is really all you can do to much with. God is still in the business of managing the final product of our life – and even if you don’t want to deal with God you can’t deny the fact that our lives end in death and our life was the processes of getting there.