Woven Together By God

Church isn’t a hobby. It’s a community of people whose love becomes visible and faith embodied within the very fabric of our lives.

Sculptural Weaving by Malgorzata Deyrup

​In yesterday’s newsletter, I wrote about my records.

​Although I got rid a big part of my collection, the few hundred I kept, each tell a particular story about a particular part of my life.

​The punk records that taught me to question everything. The jazz album that showed me how to lament. A Motown 45 that carried me through my first and second heartbreak. 

​Starring at my wall of records I noticed their colorful spines made a kind a tapestry. And that got me thinking about us, the church.

We come from all different backgrounds, cities, and social environments.

​But when we weave ourselves together, our stories and history, we too create our own unique tapestry.
 
At the center of it all is our divine weaver working, crafting, creating the greatest masterpiece of all: Life.

I invite you to take a moment to read this section of the Psalms. And think about how God's hand is fast at work in you.

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For it was you who formed my inward parts;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
  Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

                                              Psalms 139:13-15

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Before Rev. Dawn’s unexpected passing, she asked you for your favorite color. She was weaving them together into bookmarks for Advent in a Bag.

Although she didn’t finish the project, the very idea reminds us what this psalm so perfectly states: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”  And it's all because God has knitted us together, each in our own thread, in our own unique way.
 
When I think of knitting I think of Mimi, a dear friend and member of Anamesa. From the day we met, Mimi was, and probably still is, always knitting something. A wool cap, a pair of baby boots, a scarf. Each one a gift for someone.
 
In a way that’s what we are. A sacred gift, a holy creation hand-crafted by God with intention and care. While this psalm suggests each one of us is a divine masterpiece, I think it goes beyond individuality. Because what God weaves in one inevitably connects to what God weaves in others.
 
I think this psalm is really about community. Where each individual story carries the divine power to strengthen or inspire someone else’s story. Which then becomes the community’s story.

This is to say, our quirks, our wounds, our wisdom—are all part of a larger, living fabric. Like Dawn wanted to showcase in her bookmarks, your colorful thread matters because without you, something essential is missing in all of us.
 
Now, if you’ve ever watched a professional weaver at a loom, you know it’s an intense and intimate process. You have to lean in close, eyes and hands moving in sync with precision. Every color and every texture hand picked for a purpose. Even the knots and irregularities become part of its intrinsic beauty.
 
The psalmist paints an imaginative portrait of how God works with us. Taking our different colors, widths, textures and weaving them together: fearfully, wonderfully, intentionally.
 
The early church father St. John Chrysostom wrote: “We are made one body, being compacted and knit together through love.”

I offer this quote because when Dawn and I started Anamesa, we decided we wouldn’t measure our success by the size of our membership. But by the strength of our stitches.
 
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, community matters more to us than crowd size. We never set out to construct a building. But a community, that Henri Nouwen once described as “the place where God reshapes us into the people we’re meant to become.”

Church isn’t a hobby to us. It’s a community of people whose love becomes visible and faith embodied within the very fabric of our lives.
 
So what God is doing in me will bless you. And what God is doing in you will bless me.

Together we are a rich tapestry where we hold each other close in all the different ways we love God, love others, and serve both. And in that love and service, our divine weaver keeps threading us tightly together.
 
So what God is doing in me will bless you. And what God is doing in you will bless me.
 
I know life doesn’t always feel like a blessing…muchless a stunning work of art. Most days it feels like a tangled bag of yarn at best. But if you flip a tapestry over you’ll see the backside is chaos too—threads everywhere, splashes of color, patterns that make no sense. Yet the artist never hides it. It’s part of the craft.
 
You and I are the same. We show up with our doubts, fears, regrets, and past mistakes and God says, “Perfect. I can work with this.”

Because God’s grace is bigger than our mess. God’s love always makes beauty out of our knots and frayed edges.

God the real architect who builds a community of love in the space between you and me. And it’s God who’s weaving us together so that we all will be one.
 
On the night he was arrested Jesus went into the garden to pray for his followers. He prayed, “Father, may they all be one.”

Jesus doesn’t ask God to make us stronger or purer or more impressive. He prays for our unity. That we’d become one heart, one love, one body.
 
Jesus knew the future of His movement wouldn’t rise or fall on budgets or buildings, but on connection—on the kind of unity only love could create.
 
In the picture above, is an art piece we received as a gift couple of years ago from two very dear friends pf ours. Every day, I walk past this stunning work of art and think of our church.

This particular piece is a sculptural weaving. The artist, Malgorzata Deyrup, has woven hand-dyed thread with a thin layer of plywood with tightly placed warp of a loom. 
 
It reminds me of what Paul wrote in his first letter to the church in Corinth, “Just as a body has many parts, but all its parts form one body, so it is with us” (1 Cor. 12:12-13).

Now, imagine what this piece would look like if I removed one of these threads. Parts would start to unravel. Same is true with us. When one of us is missing, God’s masterpiece is unfinished.
 
God answered Jesus’ prayer. But will we? Will we be one holy and sacred body, united in love?
 
As part of last year’s theme, we asked you all to come up with ways to help us connect with each other across all our time zones and zip codes. We got some beautiful ideas. But for any of them to matter, we need everyone’s participation. Checking in. Reaching out. Getting to know someone in our church whose story you don’t know yet.
 
This is the work Jesus began when he put fishermen and tax collectors at the same table. For Jesus, it’s about crossing boundaries, restoring the forgotten, and stitching humanity back together.

The thing is, God is still weaving us, thread by thread, into something whole and alive. Taking our differences to make us one united in God’s perfect peace. So we need you to complete us.
 
We’ve seen what absence and disunity can do to the world. But imagine the harmony we can make as one humanity, united in love.

Like my record collection, our beauty comes from our variety. No single album, no single life, tells the whole story. We each bring our own melody, our own colorful thread. And when God weaves us together, something holy and sacred comes alive. Something amazing we could never create on our own
 
I know we’re not perfect people. But we’re hopeful. And willing to say, “Here’s my thread, God. It’s not much, but it’s yours if you want it.” The good news is—God always takes it. And transforms it into something better.
 
Our theme for 2026, reminds us that we’re community woven together by God. And woven communities don’t happen by accident. They’re shaped with intention. By showing up, by taking the hand of a person wildly different from you—and trusting that their thread belongs right next to yours.
 
Next week we step into Advent—the season where God weaves hope into human history through the fragile thread of a newborn child. The incarnation is the ultimate divine weaving. The holy knit into the human. Eternity stitched into time. And that child will grow up to gather the threads no one else wants; stitching them together into an everlasting masterpiece.
 
Advent isn’t just a countdown to Christmas. It’s the story of a God who comes close enough to tie our loose ends together.

​So let’s make this year, a year that we offer God our thread—bright, frayed, tangled, beloved—and be woven together with heaven and earth into a tapestry of unity and love.