Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:
We had some truly wonderful comments and discussion last week, and I am so grateful to all who engaged here! Today, I want to highlight this comment from
on last week’s essay:One of the things I like about gardening/farming, the source of much of my figurative language about "peasantly" living, is that it is very directly tied up with the will of God.
We can't control the weather, we can't control pests--all we can do is our best. We can plant with good intentions, try our best to get the timing right, try our best to care for and protect our crop, and what's the result? A storm blows in and drowns one garden, an unseasonable plague of locusts devours the next. The end result at the harvest is quite literally the Will of God. That's why harvest time is always worth celebrating. Even if it is small, it is what God wills us to reap. If it is bountiful--all the more cause for rejoicing.
It is a good exercise for humbling ourselves before the will of God in all aspects of our lives. Where are our expectations getting ahead of us? Where is God trying to teach us something? Where are we not happy with what He has given us? Is it God's fault that we are not happy, or ours?
So insightful, Scoot! Scoot writes a few newsletters here on Substack, and you can explore more about him and his work here.
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
in the weeks after the feast we take up the spindle again and turn the rough materials of our days (the wool) (the flax) into thread; and these we wind into skeins and hanks and leave on the doorstep for the One Who Weaves. He who turns dross into gold has the tapestry laid out before Him in living color and though we see but the corners and the knots and the undersides we can be sure the pattern of our days (as yet unseen) is truly beautiful.
In some traditions, the day after the feast of the Epiphany was known as Distaff Day. This marked the end of the feasting season of Christmas, when women would have ceased their housework for a time, and the start of entering back into the daily tasks and chores of “real life”.
A distaff is a tool used for spinning rough material, such as wool or flax, into useable thread. Spinning used to be a very common household task for the women of the family. Without spinning, there would be no yarn to use for knitting and weaving the family’s clothing.
Because of its associations with women’s work, the word “distaff” is used in some contexts to suggest the wider sense of the “women’s side” of something. Women’s sports, for example, or the matrilineal side of the family. Even in horse racing, female-only races are known as “distaff races”.
Historical meanings aside, there is something symbolic about the concept of the distaff. With it, the spinner turns something rough and unruly into something useful and potentially beautiful.
While this traditionally was the province of women, I pose that the value of this image—especially in the cold days of January—does not have to be gendered. This is something we all can do. And in some ways, we must.
Now that the feast is done, we are faced with weeks of winter, yet. Cold and dark, gloomy and inclement. Rough and unruly.
We are invited by the God Who Weaves to take up the distaff of these liminal days and spin beauty and utility out of them. It is not particularly difficult work, but it requires attention and care and an understanding that it may tangle before it comes true. It requires patience and diligence. It needs hope.
What good may come from these post-feast days, before the warmth of spring frees us, who can say? But the work is worthy, if we are willing.
This season, if we expect miracles, we may yet find them spinning, lengthening like a shiver of gold under our own fingertips.
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