Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Hello from Colorado!
Sometimes some of the best lessons I’ve learned had nothing to do with sitting in a classroom.
In seventh grade, I had a friend who loved making her own clothes, just like I did. We enjoyed finding patterns, choosing fabric, and seeing what we could create when we put the pieces together.
One day, my friend was making a jacket, and something went wrong. She had misread the pattern and cut more fabric than she needed for the back panel.
She panicked.
I understood why. When you’re making something, and you have already cut the fabric, there isn’t much room for mistakes. You can’t just put the fabric back together and pretend you never cut it.
But while she looked at the extra fabric, I saw it a little differently.
I started thinking about what I could do with it.
Instead of cutting the extra fabric away, I tucked it into a large pleat and redesigned the back of the jacket.
And let me tell you, that jacket turned out bad-ass!
My friend was happy, and I was pretty pleased with myself. I had taken what looked like a mistake and turned it into something neither of us had planned.
Looking back, that little seventh-grade sewing project taught me a lesson that has followed me into adulthood.
Sometimes we spend so much time looking at what went wrong that we don’t notice what’s still left.
We see the mistake.
We see the disappointment.
We see what was supposed to happen but didn’t.
And sometimes we forget to look at the fabric we still have left.
What can we do with it?
That question can change the way we look at a difficult season.
Maybe the dream didn’t work out the way we expected. Maybe a relationship changed. Maybe a career took a turn we didn’t plan for. Something we worked hard to build had to be left behind.
We may not be able to put the pieces back together exactly as they were.
But that doesn’t mean there is nothing left to work with.
I’ve learned that God can use what remains.
He can use our experiences, our mistakes, our disappointments, our knowledge, and even the things we thought had no value anymore. We may not understand how they fit into the next part of our lives, but that doesn’t mean they have no purpose.
I remember something else about that jacket.
I didn’t have a new piece of fabric to fix the problem.
I had to work with what was already there.
That may be something worth remembering when life doesn’t turn out the way we planned. We can spend our time wishing we had different material, or we can look at what is in our hands and ask God to help us see what we can still make.
That’s what makes me think about the words Jesus gave His disciples after feeding the crowd.
He told them to gather what was left so that nothing would be lost.
I love that.
Gather what remains.
Don’t automatically throw it away because it didn’t look the way you expected.
Something beautiful may still be waiting to be made.
My seventh-grade friend saw too much fabric.
I saw a pleat.
Maybe today, God is asking us to look again at something we have already called a mistake.
There may be more left than we realize.
Scripture for Today
“Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” — John 6:12 (NIV)
Those words make me pause.
What have I decided is useless simply because it didn’t turn out the way I expected?
What might happen if I gathered the pieces instead of throwing them away?
The pieces may not be the end of the story.
Maybe they’re part of the next design.
See you tomorrow for another 15 minutes with God and a stitch from Heaven.
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