Patience

I am a knitter.  The project I am currently working to finish (there comes a time when the knitting is not "process" any more; it's project -- the end must come soon) is done in linen stitch, which requires a knit/slip pattern on the front and a purl/slip pattern on the back.  Stick with me...

I noticed as I was knitting this weekend that several rows back, I had reversed the pattern for about four inches of a row.  That's about thirty or forty stitches.  The problem was that the mistake was at least eight rows back.  The project is a scarf, knit the "long" way, meaning from end to end, not from side to side.  And it's knit with fingering weight yarn -- small yarn.  Each row is 450 stitches.

So I was left with three choices -- ignore the mistake and keep knitting, unravel about 3,600 stitches, fix the mistake and reknit 3,600 stitches, or unknit each column, letting the stitches in that column run down the mistake, fix the mistake, and then reknit the column.  I couldn't ignore the mistake, and I didn't have the heart to rip-out and re-knit 3,600 stitches, so I spent a day with my magnifying light, fixing each mistake by the column method.  It's painstaking, and hard to do, because it isn't how one normally knits.  It's hard to see, and hard to fix.

But the process reminded me of the necessity of patience.  Sometimes fixing what has gone wrong requires magnifying the mistake, carefully teasing out the right stitches to get to the wrong ones, and then reworking what needs done so as to leave no scar.  In relationships, this requires love and grace.

Thank God God has these qualities in abundance.