Life is like a crazy blanket (life in community, that is)

This is a rather special blanket.

The squares are lots of different sizes, and they're not all square. Some are crocheted, some are knitted. Some are very tightly crocheted with thick wool; some are very loosely knit with thin yarn. They're all green-ish, but some are bright emerald green; some are lime green; some are pale sage green; some are dark forest green; some yarns are multi-coloured and some pieces are made up of several different colours. They have been inexpertly crocheted together by me using three different colours of wool (I kept running out).

Most of these squares started out as a 14ft high knitted Christmas tree, created by Leigh on Sea's absolutely marvellous yarn bombers. The individual squares were made by people all over the world, some expert knitters, some beginners. The yarn bombers brought them together into a wonderful piece of public art, complete with multicoloured pom-pom tinsel and fairy lights. See https://www.facebook.com/thecraftclubyarnbomb . Their idea was to use the squares to make blankets for homeless people once it was time for the tree to come down. They very kindly entrusted me with a bag of squares.

Joining all of these very different pieces together into one blanket was difficult. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to get them all to fit. Plus I had to make quite a lot of extra squares because I didn't have enough for a blanket. The finished blanket (actually it's not quite finished as I ran out of lime green to finish the edging) looks a bit of a mess. I'm a bit worried it might fall apart. But I like it.

I had one day a couple of weeks ago when I was dealing with lots of different pastoral issues all at once. I was sitting with a group trying to meet everyone's needs, which proved impossible. When I got home, rather tired, I looked at this blanket and it seemed a beautiful sign of what it means to be a community. People are all different and we do rub up against each other. We don't always agree. Sometimes we don't even like each other. But the community brings us together (in weirdly mismatched yarn). We don't have to be the same; we just have to allow ourselves to shape around each other, giving a bit here, a bit there. It's a mess. It's a work in progress. It's a beautfiul thing.

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