Mismatching and Knitting

“Katt! Put your feet down!”

I was a little startled by the three year old’s demand but I complied and stood up from the table, curious what had her so upset. She climbed down from her seat and walked around the table to stand in front of me, peering down at my feet.

“Your socks don’t match!”

With a laugh I shook my head, “You’re right sweetie. They don’t match.”

“Mine match!” She announced, pointing to her own socks.”

“Yes, they do,” I agreed. From the other room where her mom was feeding the baby I could hear her laughing at our conversation.

It was a rather amusing moment. See laundry is not my favorite chore. I don’t mind washing and drying the clothes because the machines make it easy but I hate folding them. And of course the worst part of folding clothes is always matching socks.

Seriously, you have to go through an entire load of laundry just to find the matching pink sock with white stripes? That seems a little ridiculous to me. Not to mention the fact that it can take just as long to match all the socks as it does to fold everything else in the load! That’s insane!

So years ago I came up with a solution. I stopped. I couldn’t stop folding laundry unfortunately because then my clothes would get wrinkled but I did stop matching my socks. Now most people who don’t want to match socks just buy socks that all look the same but that’s far too boring for me so now I have socks of all different color and design that hardly ever match. Today, for example, I’m wearing one blue one and one pink one.

Now my mom is someone who has to have things match. She can’t wear two different earrings that look similar much less two different socks that are completely opposite. She wouldn’t wear red and green together outside of Christmas time, because they don’t match. She notices that sort of thing. My aunt even goes a step further and matches her shirt for the day to the socks that she’s going to wear. Even the three year old I spoke of earlier has a definite opinion that things are supposed to match. Me? I just don’t care and it’s one of the things that people who know me now recognize as one of my relatively unique quirk.

All of us have quirks, different things that make us unique as individuals. Mismatched socks is just one of many little idiosyncrasies that I have all of which combined, make me, well me. God made us different. My mom’s need to match and her love of symmetry is as much a part of her as my mismatched socks and hate of laundry are a part of me.

These are small things, not really important, but when you take into account the billions of people in the world and how different each person is it really paints an incredible picture. Not one of diversity so much but of great love. Psalm 139:13 says “…You knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

God made each and every one of us. He didn’t just make Adam and Eve and then ignore the rest of human race. No! He created, knitting together, each person on the planet, including you. Have you ever watched someone knit a blanket or a sweater? It takes, time, concentration and effort. It’s not an instantaneous process and that makes it a labor of love. How fitting then, that this is the description that’s used. Our Heavenly Father loves us and he knits us together with great love, creating each of us to be unique and quirky but still in His image.