Tag paying it forward

I woke up in the middle of the night Sunday night thanking God for all my blessings:

Great husband

Great children and grandchildren

Great friends

Good health

A nice home

Abundant food and clothes

Transportation

Etc,

Etc.,

Etc.

Then after thanking God, I thought, “Well, of course, I’m thankful. Why wouldn’t I be?”

But what if I were in a different position?

What if even one of those in my list were absent? Would I still be grateful?

From my perspective, the ultimate test of my gratitude is what I do about it. I don’t believe just saying the words is enough.

If we’re truly grateful we are paying it forward, passing it on, etc., however you want to say it.

So that brings me to the subject of this post. I hope you understand that I’m sharing this with you not to pat myself on the back, but to be an encouragement, as was the Apostle Paul, by using myself as the “least” of the example.  I receive such a blessing from this I’m hoping it will encourage you so you can experience this same blessing. (While I am sharing this with all of you, only a very few people who actually know me even know about this and that’s because they’ve seen me knitting and asked me about it.)

There are two fields of thought about sharing something like this. One is that you shouldn’t share it because there is a risk of being thought of as “boasting”. The other is that by sharing something like this we encourage others to do the same and that causes even more good to be done. I have chosen this second reason for my justification and hoping no one accuses me of the first.

Anyway…………

For years, I’ve been knitting scarves and buying up inexpensive items and putting them in my “Rescue Mission” box for Christmas.

But this year I took it a step further. I wanted to challenge myself to see how many scarves I could knit in a relatively short period of time. I think I started knitting/crocheting in earnest about October. Also, I didn’t work on my project every day. I added hats to my project this year;  I have not tried hats before. I added felted flowers to the women’s hats.

I’m not going to show you each individual scarf but will photograph them in groups. I will complete even more this week. I have some specific recipients in mind for some specialty scarves. They will not know they came from me. It’s like a secret Santa kind of a thing. I love trying to figure out how to get these gifts to these people without them knowing. It’s fun. I imagine them opening their present and it truly warms my heart.

I’ve been the recipient of unexpected “gifts” myself and I know how I felt. How cool to think I can give that to someone else. Again, I’m not sharing with you in an attempt to pat myself on the back but just to make a point that, in my humble opinion, our gratitude requires so much more than just saying “Thank you, God”, although it certainly begins there.

So with all that in mind, here’s some pictures. So far, there are ten hats, and twenty-five scarves. Not all items are shown in these pictures as some have already been distributed.

Here’s the hats:

And now the scarves. Most of these were cowl-type infinity scarves but they were all different sizes. Some you can wrap around the neck two or three times, others only once. Some were bulky-type yarns, other’s much thinner. It was fun to see how they all turned out and I learned al lot about needle and yarn size and how they determine the final product.

I buy my yarn only on sale. I also find a lot of it at garage sales for almost nothing. I think the most any individual scarf costs might be about five dollars. That’s why I knitted the shorter cowl scarves rather than the really long ones. It’s much less expensive.

These scarves were sewn from double-sided plaid fabric.

And these last two are from a pattern that seaman like because they are narrower in the middle and can wrap around their neck better. I found this site that inspired these scarves.

There are all kinds of ways to show gratitude. It certainly doesn’t have to be knitted scarves and hats. It can be anything. And it doesn’t have to be a “thing”. It could be a service, cookies, some home-cooked meals, transportation, errands. There are as many ways to give back as there are people.

If you really want to, you’ll find a project that works for you.

God bless and I hope you have a good day.