“Knit Together”
Our daughter Betsy texted Jennie and me on New Year’s Day. She and husband Travis had invited friends over for New Year’s Eve who have twins a year older than four-year-old Emerson. The family spent the night in the guest bedroom downstairs.
“We had a great New Year’s Eve with A., J., and their kids. Hope you all had fun with your friends. Unfortunately, we woke up to tragic news that A.’s sister died this morning. They are suspecting a brain aneurysm. She was in her early 30s.
I’m grateful we could watch their kids while they processed this in our basement and made travel plans. We are asking for prayers for A. and her family. This was the only sister she was close with in her dysfunctional family, which makes it all the more sad. I met her sister at A.’s bachelorette weekend nine years ago. She had a husband, a six-week-old and a four-year-old.
Brought back to me when you told me about the woman in Wilmington who had an aneurysm and I didn’t understand it as a child. Still don’t as an adult. [Note: Betsy is recalling a woman, a pillar of our Wilmington, NC, church, who died suddenly of an aneurysm when Betsy was eight years old.]
Hard news. Life is so fragile and precious.”
Life is so fragile and precious indeed, a truism written and spoken when a life has been snatched away unexpectedly. Tragically. Too soon.
Part of my New Year’s Day ritual is to look back over the year that was and remember precious lives lost. I review the funerals I officiated the previous year, names noted in the trove of Christmas cards and letters received from around the country and I remember friends, former congregants, and family who died in the year that was.
For many I named in my New Year’s Day prayer of remembrance, death came after a full and fulfilling life. Of such peaceful homegoings, to quote a lovely African-American tradition, Fred Craddock said, "When old Death comes knocking on the door, open it without fear. Death will come in quietly, and in one hand he'll have peace. In the other he'll have rest." Would that we all and all our loved ones depart in such a fashion.
But then there are those like Betsy’s friend’s sister whose death leaves a six-week-old and four-year-old. Lord, have mercy. And my cousin Jen’s husband, Pat, as fine a man as you could ever know, who entered 2025 anticipating years of hard-earned, well-deserved retirement but was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died months later. Christ, have mercy. And Jamie Lyttle, aged 56, son of Jimmy Lyttle, beloved elder statesman of St. Paul AME Church in Manchester where I’ve been doing pulpit supply, who got home from his job as a chef at the hospital feeling fine, went to bed, and never woke up. Died of a heart attack in the middle of the night. Lord, have mercy.
Sitting in my chair on Thursday morning remembering those precious names and others from years gone by, I remembered a name from one year ago, New Year’s Day 2025: Oliver Bennett Hunsaker. Oliver died before he lived, lost at the three-month mark of daughter Laura’s first pregnancy in 2024. At her first trimester appointment, Laura’s doctor came into the exam room after the requisite tests with a troubled look on her face. Laura braced herself for “hard news.” It was. She told Laura she was making an appointment for her three days hence with a specialist. After a weekend of anxious waiting, the doctor had no sooner begun the exam than she pulled the stethoscope away, looked up, and told Laura and Ryan there was no heartbeat. They would learn about Trisomy 18 in the months ahead as Laura’s body recovered, Laura and Ryan’s spirits grieved, and 2024 turned to 2025. I remembered their loss and ours on New Year’s Day 2025, in Fort Collins. Nearly six months later, on Jennie and my drive home to Lexington, we stopped in Columbia. There we learned the name. For Laura and Ryan, saying Oliver Bennett aloud was a necessary part of their grief. And of Jennie’s and mine.
When Jennie learned of Laura’s pregnancy late-summer of 2024, she began a project, a labor of love: a blanket. Not knowing the sex of the child in those early weeks, she bought yarn in colors Laura likes – light green, teal, and white. Unbeknownst to Laura, Jennie worked on the blanket until we received word of the miscarriage, then set it aside.
Early fall of 2025 brought word that Laura was pregnant again. She shared the news with us, but asked we say nothing until after the first trimester exam. When her doctor told her all was well, she sent word of a March 2026 due date. Jennie, meanwhile, got the blanket out and resumed her knitting. So it was that two weeks into her third trimester, Laura and Ryan drove to Lexington for Christmas where among the many packages under the tree for the twelve gathered Shireys one was To: Laura From: Mom. A baby blanket in hues of light green, teal, and white. The fruit of a mother’s/grandmother’s grief work. A labor of love begun, paused, resumed, completed, and gifted.
For years, my morning devotional time has included reading one psalm, meditating on it, scouring a commentary from a wise pastor or academic to glean insight from his/her reflections, and then writing whatever speaks to me in my journal. After I’ve finished another round of the 150 psalms, I start over with a new commentary companion.
Coincidentally, my psalm for New Year’s Day was 139 (Coincidence, it is said, is God’s way of remaining anonymous). Having remembered Jamie and Pat and Betsy’s friend’s sister and all the others, remembering one grandchild and anticipating another, the sight of Laura cherishing the blanket begun, paused, resumed, completed, and gifted, I read:
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away…7 Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb…
Of verse 13, John Goldingay, Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, whose writing has accompanied my most recent tour of Psalms, wrote, “In some cultures, mother and grandmother would be knitting clothes for the baby so that the weaving of the limbs of a new person in the womb is paralleled by the creativity that goes on outside the womb.”
Before we received Betsy’s hard news text on New Year’s Day, Jennie and I were in Columbus, IN, visiting friends from the church we served there from 1998-2001. We went with Tim and Linda to a retirement community where several members of our former church reside. One couple, Bill and Lois, now in their late eighties, are grappling with Bill’s recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Upon receiving that hard news, Lois began a project of her own akin to Jennie’s – a colorful quilt crafted out of fabric squares on some of which are printed the names of friends and family and on others scriptures, inspirational quotes, and encouraging words they have written or spoken to Bill and Lois since the diagnosis. Lois unfurled her handiwork on the floor before us. My eyes surveyed a lovely landscape of names and words exuding warmth and wisdom. An embrace of fortifying encouragement rooted in a bedrock of lifelong faith. A knitted together embodiment of the sheltering wings of the Spirit.
Human life is fragile. These precious projects God begins in the womb will pause someday on a spectrum that spans peaceful homegoings and heart-wrenching losses and the aching grief that attends both. For whatever good news and hard news may come your way in this New Year, may you be sustained and fortified by belief in a God who knits our lives together at birth, whose project of fragile and precious life, though interrupted – paused – by human frailty, illness and death, will be resumed, completed, and ultimately gifted anew – knit together out of all things good, right, and true. As Psalm 139 promises:
16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand;
I come to the end —I am still with you.
The good news as I understand it and choose to believe it and live by it is that when the hard news and bad news comes in this new year, God will come to us with “steadfast love, and with … great power to redeem” (Ps 130:7): I am still with you
