The Back of the Tapestry

Dear reader, I wonder if you’ve ever looked at your life and thought that very little of it seems to make sense. Perhaps you’re there now. Something you were certain would work hasn’t. A relationship has changed. A door you expected to open remained firmly closed. A career or business that once seemed to provide direction suddenly doesn’t. Maybe you’re simply in one of those strange in-between seasons where the life behind you is familiar, but the life ahead hasn’t quite taken shape yet. I’ve known a few of those seasons.

For more than twenty years, I’ve used the picture of a tapestry when talking about my life and faith. I imagine standing behind a huge piece of woven fabric, looking at it from the wrong side. There are threads running everywhere. Some disappear halfway across. Others arrive seemingly from nowhere. There are knots, loose ends and colors beside one another that don’t appear to belong together. If you didn’t know there was another side, you might reasonably conclude that the whole thing was a mess. For years, I’ve carried this hope that one day God might turn the tapestry around and let me see what He has been weaving.

I don’t mean that I expect to discover that every painful thing was secretly pleasant. Some things hurt because they hurt. Some losses remain losses. Some failures really were failures, including my own. Faith doesn’t require us to rename painful things as good simply because enough time has passed. But I have lived long enough now to see something I couldn’t always see while I was living through them: threads connect.

A disappointment places you somewhere you hadn’t intended to be. Somewhere you hadn’t intended to be leads to a person you wouldn’t otherwise have met. A conversation with that person changes something. An ending creates room for a beginning you couldn’t have imagined while you were desperately trying to prevent the ending. Then, years later, you look back and think, Oh. Not because you suddenly understand everything, but because you can see a little more of the picture.

When I look backwards now, I see England, Guernsey and Texas. I see businesses, boardrooms, successes and failures. I see relationships, endings, restoration, friendships, unexpected conversations and coffee with people whose words stayed with me long after the cup was empty. I see books I didn’t know I would write, ideas I didn’t know I would have, and people I couldn’t possibly have known would become part of my story. There are threads I would have chosen and others I absolutely would not, yet somehow they are all there. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that God seems remarkably comfortable working with all of them.

I think there was a time when I imagined God would really be able to use my life once I’d finally sorted it out. Once I’d made the right decisions, overcome the difficult things, become sufficiently wise, stopped making mistakes and generally presented Him with a much tidier collection of thread. He appears not to have waited. I’m very grateful for that, because He would probably still be waiting.

Instead, some of the things I once wished I could remove from my story have become the very places from which I can sit with somebody else in theirs. Not because I have all the answers. Usually I don’t. But perhaps because I know what it is like to stare at tangled threads and wonder whether there could possibly be a picture on the other side.

Maybe that’s where you are today. If it is, I’m not going to tell you that everything happens for a reason. I’ve always found that sentence rather too small for some of the things people are asked to carry. I’m also not going to promise you that one day every question will receive a satisfying answer. I have questions of my own that remain unanswered. What I will tell you is that unfinished is not the same as abandoned.

I think we confuse those two sometimes. When we can’t see what God is doing, we assume He isn’t doing anything. When the threads look tangled, we assume the Weaver has lost the pattern. When a season lasts longer than we’d like, we wonder whether we’ve somehow been forgotten. But the back of a tapestry cannot tell you what the front looks like. That’s the difficulty, and perhaps that’s faith: not pretending the threads aren’t tangled, but trusting that our view of them isn’t the only view there is.

I’ve been thinking lately about how this changes the way we sit with other people too. If I’m looking at the back of my own tapestry, I should probably be rather cautious about claiming to understand yours. We are quick to offer explanations. Perhaps too quick. We tell people what they should do, what their experience means, why something happened, what God is teaching them, and how they ought to move forward. Increasingly, I’d rather pull up a chair, listen, ask a question, stay when there isn’t an obvious answer, and remind someone that one difficult chapter doesn’t get to name the whole story.

Perhaps hope sometimes looks less like explaining the picture and more like sitting beside someone while they wait for it to become clearer. That’s one of the reasons the Front Porch exists. Some people will arrive here carrying beautiful threads. Life is good. Things are opening. There is joy and momentum and a sense that the picture is beginning to emerge. Others will arrive with knots. Most of us, if we’re honest, carry both. You don’t need to untangle everything before you sit down. There is no admission requirement for the porch.

I’m increasingly convinced that some of life’s deepest peace comes not when every thread finally makes sense, but when we stop demanding that it must before we can trust God. That’s been a difficult lesson for someone like me. I like understanding things. I like solutions. I like knowing where we’re going. Give me a problem and my natural instinct is still to find a solution. God, however, has not always shown much respect for my preference for complete information. More often, He seems to give enough for the next step, and then another.

Looking backwards, I can see that some of the seasons I most wanted to hurry through were doing work in me that couldn’t have been hurried. Some threads needed time. Perhaps yours do too.

So if you’re reading this from behind the tapestry today, surrounded by loose ends and colors that don’t seem to belong together, I won’t ask you to pretend that you can see a beautiful picture. Maybe you can’t. Not yet. Instead, perhaps you can do something smaller. Take the thread that is actually in your hand. Be faithful with today. Have the conversation. Make the decision you know you need to make. Rest if rest is what’s required. Wait if there is nowhere honest to move yet. Ask God for enough light for the next step rather than demanding the entire pattern, and trust, however imperfectly, that the Weaver can see something you cannot.

There are parts of my tapestry I think I can finally glimpse now. Others remain firmly turned away from me. That’s okay. I’m beginning to think I don’t need God to turn the whole thing around just yet. Perhaps one day He will. For now, I’ve seen enough of His faithfulness in the threads behind me to trust Him with the ones still being woven ahead.

Maybe that’s all any of us ever really gets. And maybe it’s enough.

Until next time,

— Kyan

P.S. — If you’re standing behind your own tapestry at the moment and there’s a thread you can’t make sense of, hit reply and tell me about it. I may not have an answer, but perhaps answers aren’t always what we need from the person sitting in the other chair.