I added a few more rows of blocks to the winter quilt I've been working on:



It's about 1/4-1/3 what the finished size will be at this point. It's slow to work on because all the silver spangly stuff makes it harder to sew through.

Here's a close-up of some of the fabrics in it:




Abrupt transition time:

Last night, after Youth Group, I got to thinking about how adults have more or less succeeded at making love both more and less than it really is.

They make it MORE because of all the songs celebrating love, all of the underlying assumption of movies and television shows and books and songs and plays - that if you don't have love (and the particular definition of love that's important), you're nothing and you should go live in a cave because the aura of loser around you really, like, brings everyone else down, you know.

But they also make it LESS because there is one overriding TYPE of love that's seen as important by all the movies, television shows, et al: romantic love, with love of your own biological children a second best. Any other kind of love is either seen as childish or a pathetic substitute.

And I was thinking about this, because lately we've had some wee tiny children coming on Wednesday night, and they are very different from the loud largefooted teenaged boys I normally deal with (Not that the teenaged boys don't have their wonderful moments, they do, and they're really good kids, but they're already learning how to be adults, and losing some things that little kids haven't yet). There was one little boy - I don't think he's been there before, I don't remember him. He is probably 2 1/2 or 3. He stayed down in the nursery with the littler kids after dinner but saw me again at the end of the evening. I had had bookmarks and those paint-it plastic suncatchers as a craft for the kids (although most of the older boys elected to practice their wrestling moves on the mats instead: which frankly makes me nervous, what if one of the kids gets hurt? My co-leader doesn't prohibit it though, and she served as referee, so I tried not to worry).

Anyway. The little boy saw some of the kids with their bookmarks and he looked kind of wistful, and one of the little girls who had been in the nursery said she wished she could have made one. So I quickly pulled out a couple of the pieces of cardstock we were using, and pulled out the stickers I had left, and had them pick out stickers to put on the cardstock. And then I gave them their "bookmarks" (they are probably all too young to read yet).

And as we were getting ready to go out the door, the little boy looked up at me and said, "I love you."

Aw man. I was not prepared for that. And I think he meant it totally sincerely (at least at the moment; next week he might not remember having said it). Because what do three year olds know of using or withholding love as a way of manipulating?

And I got to thinking of how adults have kind of debauched the topic, how it's almost stereotypical now to joke about someone saying "I love you" to their date or companion when they really mean "I'd love to sleep with you." And I, personally, have had the experience of people gushing "I love you!" at me when they saw me doing some thankless arduous task that THEY were supposed to do, but "hadn't gotten around to yet."

And how hard it is to tell someone you "love" them (even sometimes in your own family), because there have been so many weird accretions to and stains on the word and the concept of "love" over the years, and it's so easily misunderstood.

And I don't know what to say about that; I don't know that we can reclaim the word and make it once again useful for a variety of things beyond feelings for immediate family or lovers. It has been, I think, trivialized, as in the old beer commercial about "I love you, man" "Yeah, well, you're not getting my last beer" (talk about love being commodified). Several weeks ago, the sermon was on the difference between love and like: that like is something for YOUR preferences, it's all about YOUR emotions and YOUR feeling good. But love is something different - it is what you put out to the world rather than what you take in, and that it is entirely possible to love someone without much liking them at the moment (as one of my friends has commented about her marriage: we always love each other but once in a while there are short periods of time where we don't like each other very much).

I don't know, but sometimes I think we use "love" when we really mean "like" in this culture. And we overlook "love" sometimes when it's not something that fits into our new narrowed definition...