Wonder Stitches

I have a story to elaborate upon in this post that has to do with how we really get to know the authentic movements of the hearts of our loved-ones, and how this embrace encircles our hearts together in a love that can be wordless at its depths. It is also about how to serve the Lord with a guileless and a worshipful heart.

It is the story from Acts 9:36-42 about a woman named Tabitha, or Dorcas, in the Greek (which means gazelle). She was compassionately raised from the dead through Peter, because of the desperate need that he saw in her community to have her back with them. What made the tears of her friends so telling? Was Dorcas a great orator? Was she a widely traveled woman who had carried the Word abroad? Would we call her a world-mover, or a super-hero, or even a great motivator of people to her cause? Most likely, none of these would fit--not by her seemingly simple acts--which we will see.  Every day she pulled a needle and thread through fabric.  She made tunics for the poor widows who had captured her sweet disciple’s passions by their impoverished distress. Here is her story from the Scripture:

“At Joppa there was a certain disciple named Tabitha, which is translated Dorcas. This woman was full of good works and charitable deeds which she did.  But it happened in those days that she became sick and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in an upper room. And since Lydda was near Joppa, and the disciples had heard that Peter was there, they sent two men to him, imploring him not to delay in coming to them. Then Peter arose and went with them. When he had come they brought him to the upper room. And all the widows stood by him weeping, showing the tunics and garments which Dorcas had made while she was with them. But Peter put them all out, and knelt down and prayed. And turning to the body he said, “Tabitha, arise.” And she opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up. Then he gave her his hand and lifted her up, and when he had called the saints and the widows, he presented her alive. And it became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed on the Lord.”

Every time I envision those friends uncontrollably weeping, not able to speak, but only able to point to the wonders that her hands had produced, my heart leaps over the ways that we are given to cherish each other. I included a picture today of how I think those widow’s tunics must have felt to the recipients as they held them up for Peter to see. They must have been like wrappings of wonder around their Children-of-God bodies. Her love for them, as she wove and pieced together the material, dressed them up in a wonder of grace that they may have never known in any other way.

Dorcas didn’t amass a great industry in Joppa to sew with her; She didn’t put posters around the city about the widow’s plight; She didn’t feel that she had the only way to help the poor. It would seem that each day she was simply seen untiringly at her post, with tenderlovingkindness, bent over the next wonder-embrace that she would give to the next dear soul who needed the warmth she could supply.

What is so compelling about Dorcas is that by her simple, but monumental, love we are told that this disciple’s life brought many to belief in the Lord. Her name meaning the gazelle tells me that she was so light and lovely, so bounding and quick, that she knew, without any reserve, what the call upon her life was and she leapt to it instantly, never calculating its reach--only seeing the one in need before her. The Holy Spirit power that raised her by Peter’s prayer and his gentlemanly offering of his hand to help her up tells me to stop any rehearsals about how my ministry should progress, and to call it all worship, just like Dorcas did as she stitched wonder into her tunics--never counting the number. A tunic, made in love, is as big as a dedicated ministry that touches thousands. Heaven’s mathematics finds its proof in the authenticity of the heart.

Wonder-stitches! Dorcas and her precious story makes me want to leap to those things that He has gifted me with that would help to hold together those around me with the sweet and immeasurably grand love of Jesus. How the community must have wept again, now with joy, when Peter returned her to them alive and ready to make another tunic--full of wonder!