Stitching Freedom
🤔 Finding peace through service in the present moment
There’s a group of men in a maximum-security prison in Missouri who spend eight hours a day, five days a week, making quilts for kids in the foster system.
Beautiful quilts. The kind of quilts you’d expect to come from someone’s sweet old grandma who sits in a rocking chair, humming the songs of yesteryear.
Instead, the artisans are doing hard time, some serving life sentences for crimes as severe as murder.
But in their quilting station, there’s peace. Community. A deep sense of pride and responsibility.
These men find purpose in creating one-of-a-kind works of art for kids who’ve been forgotten and displaced. It’s all part of a program called the Restorative Justice Organization, recently featured in a Netflix documentary. (See trailer below.)
For me, the most moving part of the doc (which you should watch ASAP) is a conversation with a man called Chill. The world disappears when Chill leans over the sewing machine, meticulously stitching the intricate patterns that sometimes keep him up at night.
In those moments, the prison walls fall away, and he’s as free as ever. Why? Because he’s fully present. But also, because he’s serving. He knows how meaningful these quilts will be to the children who receive them.
It’s a meditation that reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s experience in Man’s Search for Meaning. Even amid the horror and inhumanity of the Nazi death camps, Frankl found hope (and shared hope with others) through acts of service and presence of mind.
Most of us will never know the suffering isolation of imprisonment or the terror of being kidnapped and tortured in the name of hate. But we can all relate to loneliness. We all face seasons of suffering.
Chill teaches us a lesson echoed in every great spiritual: whenever you feel lost, serve where you are.
To be absorbed in the eternal now is to be free of the pain of the past and the fear of the future. It’s restorative. And service is a kind of freedom.
How will you serve today?
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