"For it was You who formed my inward parts
You knit me together in my mother's womb" ~ Psalm 139:13
The verse quoted above is from a Psalm that beautifully depicts just how well we are known and loved by God. I particularly like this verse because it depicts not only God's provision for us before we were born, but also how He intricately formed us in His image. As a knitter myself, I am well aware of the time commitment and focus required to do it well, and it speaks of a God who cares enough about all of humanity to work so hard to create each one of us. My knowledge of knitting and the words of this passage are also the reason I am against two things that unfortunately are embraced by society, including some of my fellow Christians: abortion and transgenderism.
Abortion: My pro-life stance has been well documented in my posts "Choose Life" and "Unplanned" so I won't go into it much further here. How this verse relates to my stance is simple: one does not simply undo something knit. Sure, you may have had a favorite sweater that got snagged and a part of it ripped, but chances are it stayed mostly intact. Suppose you were a crafty person like me, and the hole was too big to easily fix. You could decide to just pull it out the rest of the way and reuse the yarn. While that is entirely possible, and probably something I would do, it would not be easy, and the yarn would not look very smooth when you were done. Depending on how tightly you pulled, the yarn might also be stretched out in places, which would prevent it from working as well in the new project. Even just a little bit of knitting, like I did a few weeks ago to test out a pattern that looked like it would be a pain in the butt, leaves a kinky, loopy mess when it's pulled out. (FYI, that pattern was a total pain. My fingers were screaming after just doing four test rows.)
Suppose you have a few patterns to test, but don't want to have a bunch of test swatches hanging around the house, so you test them one at a time using the same ball of yarn. I have done that before, and with each test, the yarn grew weaker, the spun fibers started loosening, and it stretched out. I ended up using multiple balls of leftover yarn, and only testing four or five patterns with each ball, so they wouldn't completely disintegrate. I ended up making a cat toy out of one of those balls afterward because that was all it was good for following my tests.
So how does all this relate to abortion? Each abortion takes a piece of God's knitting at some stage and rips it apart. An early one would be like one of those test patterns, not much involved, but there's still evidence it was there. A late term one, which more and more "feminists" are pushing for, would be more like unraveling the ripped sweater; a grueling process leaving destruction and tangled strands in its wake. There are women who claim to feel no remorse, and no regrets, after having an abortion, but whether or not their mind acknowledges it, their body knows what happened. Some women even have multiple abortions and don't even bat an eye, but just like the yarn that was used for test after test, each one weakens their body. Any one of them could be the one that prevents them from ever carrying a pregnancy to term when they want to have children.
Transgenderism: I could go on and on about what I really think about this, but for the purpose of this post, I'll stick to how it relates to being knit together by God. Someone who is transgender is basically saying that when God knit them together, He used the wrong pattern. Some pretty much stick to the appearance of the "wrong pattern," but change their name, their clothing, and their hairstyle to fit who they think they should be. Some become drag queens, keeping their appearance as the man God created them to be during the day, but becoming the woman they feel they truly are at night. However, some are so convinced that God knit them together with the wrong pattern that they take steps to fix His "mistake" and form themselves into the pattern they think they should have been made with all along. In real knitting, that is almost a sheer impossibility.
One Christmas, I decided to knit a hat for my cousin Jen, who was nine at the time. I chose a pattern for a child's hat that looked absolutely gorgeous. However, the pattern designer wrote down the brand of the yarn she used to make the pattern, but did not indicate what weight rating it was. I did a quick Google search, which brought up a plethora of different yarns that were made by that brand, with varying weight ratings. None of the yarn looked like the picture, and all of it was out of my price range, so I just grabbed a skein of my favorite yarn in Jen's favorite color and got to work. I don't know if the yarn I used was thicker than the yarn the designer used or if I knit looser than she does, or if it's a combination of the two, but when I finished, the hat was way too big for even my head. I discovered that I could pull the edge of the hat all the way down to my neck, and I briefly considered turning it into a ski mask, but quickly realized that doing so would not be practical. I would have needed to cut the stitches and then make sure they didn't unravel further, then find some way to make it look as if it was always meant to be a ski mask. Keeping it an extra large hat was a much better plan, and as it turned out, I could fit my entire ponytail into the extra space, and even wear earmuffs under it on super cold days.
Looking at it this way, it seems crazy for people to try and form themselves into something different than God knit them to be, but this is not the craziest thing I've heard in regards to this issue. Recently I read an article about a pregnant transgender man. He had been taking testosterone for years, but he and his partner, who is biologically male, decided that they wanted to have a child. His doctor told him that it would be possible if he suspended his testosterone treatments, so he did, and became pregnant five months later. In the article, he talks about the negativity he and his partner received, almost as if he was surprised about it. There is also a video in the article where he describes how he never really wanted to be biologically male, but he wanted to look like a man and be addressed as a man, but keep himself internally female.
As sweet as this guy seems to be, there is a flaw to his logic. He's basically saying that he felt like he was made with the wrong pattern, but only wants to change part of the pattern. That would be as absurd as if I cut eyeholes into that hat to partially make it into a ski mask, but then continued to wear it as a hat. (It looks like a contestant on the premiere episode of Holey Moley did just that, and boy, did it look stupid.) Then, having done that, being surprised that people thought I looked dumb, or even getting mad at them about it, which seems to be some transgender peoples' reaction in similar situations. My reactions wouldn't make sense after partially altering my own knitting, and they don't make any more sense after someone partially alters God's knitting.
Concluding Thoughts: For the reasons given above, I firmly believe that neither abortion nor transgenderism makes sense in the context of each human being knit together by God himself. However, neither one is unforgivable. God loves all of us no matter what unraveling or alterations we have made to His handiwork. Therefore, we should be loving to everyone we meet, even if we don't agree with what they have done with their lives. We also should speak the truth to them in love to help keep them from making the same mistakes again. God loves us where we are, but he loves us way too much to want us to stay that way.
You knit me together in my mother's womb" ~ Psalm 139:13
The verse quoted above is from a Psalm that beautifully depicts just how well we are known and loved by God. I particularly like this verse because it depicts not only God's provision for us before we were born, but also how He intricately formed us in His image. As a knitter myself, I am well aware of the time commitment and focus required to do it well, and it speaks of a God who cares enough about all of humanity to work so hard to create each one of us. My knowledge of knitting and the words of this passage are also the reason I am against two things that unfortunately are embraced by society, including some of my fellow Christians: abortion and transgenderism.
Abortion: My pro-life stance has been well documented in my posts "Choose Life" and "Unplanned" so I won't go into it much further here. How this verse relates to my stance is simple: one does not simply undo something knit. Sure, you may have had a favorite sweater that got snagged and a part of it ripped, but chances are it stayed mostly intact. Suppose you were a crafty person like me, and the hole was too big to easily fix. You could decide to just pull it out the rest of the way and reuse the yarn. While that is entirely possible, and probably something I would do, it would not be easy, and the yarn would not look very smooth when you were done. Depending on how tightly you pulled, the yarn might also be stretched out in places, which would prevent it from working as well in the new project. Even just a little bit of knitting, like I did a few weeks ago to test out a pattern that looked like it would be a pain in the butt, leaves a kinky, loopy mess when it's pulled out. (FYI, that pattern was a total pain. My fingers were screaming after just doing four test rows.)
Suppose you have a few patterns to test, but don't want to have a bunch of test swatches hanging around the house, so you test them one at a time using the same ball of yarn. I have done that before, and with each test, the yarn grew weaker, the spun fibers started loosening, and it stretched out. I ended up using multiple balls of leftover yarn, and only testing four or five patterns with each ball, so they wouldn't completely disintegrate. I ended up making a cat toy out of one of those balls afterward because that was all it was good for following my tests.
So how does all this relate to abortion? Each abortion takes a piece of God's knitting at some stage and rips it apart. An early one would be like one of those test patterns, not much involved, but there's still evidence it was there. A late term one, which more and more "feminists" are pushing for, would be more like unraveling the ripped sweater; a grueling process leaving destruction and tangled strands in its wake. There are women who claim to feel no remorse, and no regrets, after having an abortion, but whether or not their mind acknowledges it, their body knows what happened. Some women even have multiple abortions and don't even bat an eye, but just like the yarn that was used for test after test, each one weakens their body. Any one of them could be the one that prevents them from ever carrying a pregnancy to term when they want to have children.
Transgenderism: I could go on and on about what I really think about this, but for the purpose of this post, I'll stick to how it relates to being knit together by God. Someone who is transgender is basically saying that when God knit them together, He used the wrong pattern. Some pretty much stick to the appearance of the "wrong pattern," but change their name, their clothing, and their hairstyle to fit who they think they should be. Some become drag queens, keeping their appearance as the man God created them to be during the day, but becoming the woman they feel they truly are at night. However, some are so convinced that God knit them together with the wrong pattern that they take steps to fix His "mistake" and form themselves into the pattern they think they should have been made with all along. In real knitting, that is almost a sheer impossibility.
One Christmas, I decided to knit a hat for my cousin Jen, who was nine at the time. I chose a pattern for a child's hat that looked absolutely gorgeous. However, the pattern designer wrote down the brand of the yarn she used to make the pattern, but did not indicate what weight rating it was. I did a quick Google search, which brought up a plethora of different yarns that were made by that brand, with varying weight ratings. None of the yarn looked like the picture, and all of it was out of my price range, so I just grabbed a skein of my favorite yarn in Jen's favorite color and got to work. I don't know if the yarn I used was thicker than the yarn the designer used or if I knit looser than she does, or if it's a combination of the two, but when I finished, the hat was way too big for even my head. I discovered that I could pull the edge of the hat all the way down to my neck, and I briefly considered turning it into a ski mask, but quickly realized that doing so would not be practical. I would have needed to cut the stitches and then make sure they didn't unravel further, then find some way to make it look as if it was always meant to be a ski mask. Keeping it an extra large hat was a much better plan, and as it turned out, I could fit my entire ponytail into the extra space, and even wear earmuffs under it on super cold days.
Looking at it this way, it seems crazy for people to try and form themselves into something different than God knit them to be, but this is not the craziest thing I've heard in regards to this issue. Recently I read an article about a pregnant transgender man. He had been taking testosterone for years, but he and his partner, who is biologically male, decided that they wanted to have a child. His doctor told him that it would be possible if he suspended his testosterone treatments, so he did, and became pregnant five months later. In the article, he talks about the negativity he and his partner received, almost as if he was surprised about it. There is also a video in the article where he describes how he never really wanted to be biologically male, but he wanted to look like a man and be addressed as a man, but keep himself internally female.
As sweet as this guy seems to be, there is a flaw to his logic. He's basically saying that he felt like he was made with the wrong pattern, but only wants to change part of the pattern. That would be as absurd as if I cut eyeholes into that hat to partially make it into a ski mask, but then continued to wear it as a hat. (It looks like a contestant on the premiere episode of Holey Moley did just that, and boy, did it look stupid.) Then, having done that, being surprised that people thought I looked dumb, or even getting mad at them about it, which seems to be some transgender peoples' reaction in similar situations. My reactions wouldn't make sense after partially altering my own knitting, and they don't make any more sense after someone partially alters God's knitting.
Concluding Thoughts: For the reasons given above, I firmly believe that neither abortion nor transgenderism makes sense in the context of each human being knit together by God himself. However, neither one is unforgivable. God loves all of us no matter what unraveling or alterations we have made to His handiwork. Therefore, we should be loving to everyone we meet, even if we don't agree with what they have done with their lives. We also should speak the truth to them in love to help keep them from making the same mistakes again. God loves us where we are, but he loves us way too much to want us to stay that way.
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