Saturday, April 14, 2007 12:21 AM CDT
Prayer and comfort
Prayer Shawl Ministry makes and delivers handmade hope in times of sorrow and joy
By BONNIE CLARK, Features Writer
bclark@jg-tc.com
Jody Sparks’ husband came home from a Springfield hospital in March 2006 with hospice care in place. She knew the prognosis was dire and yet, when he died five months later her world came crashing down around her.
“You think you are prepared, but there’s no way you can prepare,” the Mattoon woman said. “You hold yourself together for your children, but you are not OK.”
Although they couldn’t take away the pain, a group of women from the Wesley United Methodist Church in Charleston — who, except for one member, Jo Swick, had never met Sparks — let her know in a tangible way that God’s grace would nourish and comfort her.
The group is part of a Prayer Shawl Ministry whose mission is making shawls — usually crocheted, knitted or woven — and delivering them to people in need of comfort and also in times of joy and celebration.
“Jo had tried to bring me a shawl earlier,” Sparks said. “But on one particular Saturday, two weeks after the funeral, I had a meltdown, and that’s the day she happened to bring it to me.
“I just wrapped up in the shawl and cried,” she said.
“You feel the warmth and love that went into making the shawl and the grief and the loneliness that you feel is sort of absorbed by it and you are able to let go of some of the pain.”
According to Swick, the Prayer Shawl Ministry was started initially in 1998 by two women, Janet Bristow and Victoria Galo, who graduated from the 1997 Women’s Leadership Institute at The Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
Their intent was to combine their love of knitting and crocheting with a spiritual ministry.
In December, Sparks and Swick initiated a Prayer Shawl Ministry at the First Presbyterian Church in Mattoon. The women, who meet on Sunday afternoons, call themselves the Sacred Mission Stitchers.
As they sit down to work on their crocheting or knitting, Swick said, they say a prayer that God will lead them in deciding where the shawl will go. And they think of the person, still unknown to them, who will be the recipient of the prayers they are offering.
“We’ve only had one young person who kind of thought the shawl was magical,” Swick said. “So we did a quick, ‘No, there’s no magic in it.’
“It’s just that we continue to pray for you. We pray for the people who get the shawls. We don’t even know who all of them are, but God knows who they are,” she said.
“‘There’s no magic in the shawl,’ we told her, ‘it’s just a reminder that we’re praying for you.’”
Swick said the group makes shawls for local people and also mails shawls to people who live in other towns and states, using their own patterns and yarns.
“There are patterns on the official Prayer Shawl Ministry Web site,” Swick said, “and suggestions of yarns to use, so we do have some guidelines. There are also sample prayers online.”
The group at First Presbyterian Church started meeting in December. Before that, Swick worked with the group at the Methodist Church in Charleston, which has had its shawl ministry for about three years.
Ruth Hay of the Methodist group said there are currently about 30 to 40 women involved in the ministry.
“The group has completed around 400 or more shawls since we started,” Hay said.
Shawls are made independently and the group meets the second Monday morning of each month.
“We pray for all the shawls, and again at the time they are presented,” she said.
At St. Charles Catholic Church in Charleston pastoral associate Charmaine Owens is coordinator of the Prayer Shawl Ministry, which started in October.
“The beauty of it is that each shawl connects us to people we don’t even know,” Owens said. “God knows who is going to receive a shawl and He knows that our prayers are meant just for that recipient.”
While shawls can also be given for happy occasions — birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, arrival of new babies — it seems the connection and comfort of being wrapped in prayer seems to especially nourish the spirits of those who are ill or suffering the loss of a loved one.
The Prayer Shawl Ministry not only comforted Sparks in the early days following her husband’s death, it has continued to surround her in God’s grace, she said.
“Suddenly, here you are alone after 32 years of marriage and you have all these questions — ‘Who am I and where do I go from here? How am I going to get through this?’
“This group was God’s answer,” she said, “telling me to help someone else. And they have rallied around me. It’s been like a mini support group within the church.
“There’s a huge hole in my life that I think will never be filled,” she said, “but they kind of fill in around the edges.
“To me, being a part of the group has been a double blessing. This is God’s work we’re doing.”
Contact Bonnie Clark at bclark@jg-tc.com or 348-5727.
Add your comments
Not already registered?
Then click Here.
Comment policy:
JG-TC.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted are not posted to the site immediately. They go into a queue to be moderated and may take several hours to be reviewed. Comments posted on Saturday may not be reviewed until Sunday afternoon.
In order to keep the page a set width, long lines (mostly long links) will be chopped. Try putting spaces in your links or consider using tinyurl.com to make a smaller link that you can include.
We will never edit or alter your comments, but we do reserve the right to remove comments that violate our code of conduct.
No comment may contain:
* Potentially libelous statements; such as accusing somebody of a crime, defamation of character, or statements that can harm somebody's reputation.
* Obscene, explicit, or racist language.
* Personal attacks, insults, threats, harassment or inciting violence.
* Commercial product promotions.
If you have any questions, please contact our moderator.
|
|
CLICK TO ENLARGE
 Kevin Kilhoffer (JG/T-C)
From left, Jan Cornell, Sharon Mercer, Jodi Sparks, Anne McCoy and Jo Swick work on some of the prayer shawls at the First Presbyterian Church on April 6.
|
Lucy Larson wrote on Apr 14, 2007 12:39 PM: