A Labor of Love

[The Lord] heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3

An ambulance arrived at my house. My son, David, had had a seizure and had taken a pretty hard fall. He dislocated his shoulder and gashed his chin. Before loading my son into the ambulance, the paramedics informed us they would be cutting David’s sweatshirt off to care for his shoulder. 

That was the least of my worries. David, however, was not happy. He had worked hard to earn the sweatshirt and couldn’t get another one. He asked me to fix it. 

My first thought was throw it away and move on. You moms know how it is though. I looked at my son in the hospital bed, stitches in his chin and connected to machines. “I’ll try,” I said.

I grew up in a family of seamstresses. Surely I could repair the shirt in a few minutes. I pulled it out of the bag.

What have I gotten myself into?

The sweatshirt had been cut from the cuff of the sleeve to the neck on both sides. An additional cut was made in the front from the bottom to the shoulder. I had pictured straight, smooth cuts. These were jagged like the display lines of the hospital monitoring machines. 

No way would this be a quick and easy fix. I would have to stitch it by hand to match up the two pieces of fabric. Slowly and tediously I pulled the needle and thread, reconnecting the material. Then I overstitched the hand stitching with a zigzag machine. I told David this was a labor of love.

Isn’t this what Jesus does for each of us? He lovingly repairs the jagged hurts in our hearts caused by others. He meticulously stitches up the gashes from our moral and spiritual falls.

My husband jokingly said I should use red thread on the gray sweatshirt. Jesus binds up our wounds with the scarlet thread of his blood. This is his labor of love for us.

Terri