Twenty years of making a blog

I came to a point in the middle of my knitting last night where the pattern in the row I was knitting was not matching up with the pattern two rows below. It's lace; the pattern is the whole point. The group of five plain stitches in the row I was knitting had to be centered on a group of three stitches below it, but that group of three had somehow turned into five, with holes intentionally made by yarnovers falling in the wrong places. As I studied the work in front of me I saw that midway through a previous row my eyes had slipped down to the wrong row on the chart and there was much more that was wrong than just a few stitches. I remembered that the previous right-side row had ended with only half a repeat of the pattern. Now I knew why. 

There was no easy remedy. Some knitting mistakes can be fixed with just a five or ten-minute digression. To fix this one I was going to need to rip out two rows, which doesn't sound that bad -- except that each row currently holds approximately 350 stitches long. The silk yarn is slippery as a guppy in a fish tank, and the pattern is complicated, so they have to be taken out one by one. When a stitch slips away from me  I have to grab it fast and then solve the puzzle of how to bring it back into the pattern. 

Mistakes and correcting them. Isn't that a lot like life? 

I've long had a rule for myself about mistakes in knitting or sewing: you don't have to fix them before you put the project down and go to bed, but you do have to rip out the mistake so that when you next pick up the work you can go forward rather than back. This has kept messed-up projects from spending an indefinite amount of time tossed into a corner or abandoned altogether. I don't like to get up in the morning and look at what went so wrong the night before. Late last night however I put the knitting down with a couple hundred stitches left to rip out and a long, twisty strand of yarn lying on the couch cushion. It's full of static electricity; it's not going anywhere. 

I am a maker. Not in the larger economic sense of job-creator, business person, technology innovator, youthful start-up entrepreneur, etc. Just in the humble sense of always being in the middle of making something: shawls, sweaters, socks, quilts, handwoven dish towels, occasionally even a meal. We are a category of people, we makers. I am more likely to give you something I've made if you, too, make things, because I know you'll appreciate it. 

I started this blog on February 26, 2006 -- twenty years ago. I was at a point in life where I was waiting to see what was next. I had sent one child off to college the previous fall; the other two would soon be in high school. My husband was in a nursing home with late-stage dementia. Transitions all around. What do I do while I'm waiting? I make something.

Writing is a kind of making, working with words, information and images to create something where there once was nothing. Fixing mistakes is easier on a screen than in real life, easier even than rearranging quilt blocks. The finished project? Here at The Perverse Lutheran it's often some kind of discovery: a new idea, grace, endurance. It seems to me that I found those things more readily twenty years ago or ten years ago when much of the light shining in The Perverse Lutheran came from Gronks Finding Grace, my son Kris's blog about his journey through ALS. 

In 2026 it feels harder to make a path through the weeds, harder to find the clearing. It's a much noisier world. Empathy is overextended; cynicism is easy. I'm tired, I say to myself. I'm overwhelmed. I start blog posts hoping to figure something out but then abandon them.

I'll pick up the silk shawl tonight. I'll finish pulling out those stitches and then reknit them. And tomorrow, maybe, the quilt blocks spread on my dining room table made of print fabric purchased years ago will be joined together with a teal blue solid purchased yesterday. 

It's good to be making things instead of being pushed around by tides and time. I hope that making blog posts, too, continues to be a good thing, putting words together to make small islands of grace and light. 

FROM THE ARCHIVE

"Shining"  from ten years ago. I think "Do the Next Thing" would also be a good title.

A Lenten Prayer from 2006.

Zero sum?

No fear -- this is Gwen writing, not an AI experiment like a couple weeks ago. Although Google has offered to help me with this blog, to find keywords and add links to them and/or to add image previews, I am rejecting that AI-powered assistance. I suppose that accepting Google's help would push me higher up in the algorithm, wherever that lives, but I'd rather not see my sentences, however they turn out, littered with underlined words in colored type and links that bear no connection to my thinking. There are links in what follows, but I put them there myself and there's no need to click on them.

First thing I read this morning was this: Zero-sum economics keeps failing, a Substack post by econ blogger Noah Smith, who on Substack is called Noahpinion. He wrote something recently that led me to click the subscribe button, and now I get an email from him two or three times a week. The full text of his posts is in the email -- he's not making money off me. I blame Paul Krugman, one of the few Substack accounts I do pay for, though again, most of his posts are mostly free. Back when Krugman wrote for the New York Times I read hime regularly because he, a Nobel Laureate in economics, had the gift of being able to explain macro- and microeconomics in ordinary language. This quality, nothing to sneeze at, is my intellectual love language. 

This morning Noahpinion's post used empirical data, displayed in graphs and tables, to demonstrate that immigration is good (i.e., on the whole, doesn't take jobs from citizens) and tariffs are bad (i.e., they don't create manufacturing jobs in America). Taking stuff away from some people it turns out does not increase the good or goods that others get to own and enjoy. Pluses and take-aways don't zero out everywhere as they might in algebra. 

(Simple math is predictive in other places, like when counting threads in dents and heddles on harnesses on a loom. I consulted the calculator on my phone multiple times yesterday afternoon. As well as Alexa -- give her a math problem and she's back with an answer in seconds. You do need to write down what she says. There's still a market for pens and sticky notes.)

The failures of zero-sum economics made for a great kick-off for a Sunday in Epiphany. As the kingdom of God is revealed in Jesus, zero-sum economics and everything else are turned upside down, inside out, and refuted, at least on a metaphysical level. I'm pretty sure I heard this expressed in a sermon as anti-zero-sum thinking at some point in the past. All the way back during Reaganomics? Or after a financial crisis in the early oughts? I know it echoed through all that hope and change we saw on the horizon when Barack Obama was president. 

The thing is, it's true. Not just in religion but in the real world. Big picture, many things get even bigger and more generous as we all participate in them. We're not dividing a pie, we're sharing an expanding one. This is so much better than learning to live with less all around when the pie contracts because of circumstances or selfishness or bad policy. Or than some of us living with a lot less while others enjoy a lot more. (I'll leave it to Substack economists to pursue this theory into dealing with the federal deficit.)

I heard the refutation of zero-summing in the Old Testament lesson in church this morning, as Isaiah offered a bigger, more expansive vision:

 “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
  to raise up the tribes of Jacob
  and to restore the survivors of Israel;
 I will give you as a light to the nations,
  that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”  (Isaiah 49:6)

And I heard it again this afternoon in a Bach Cantata, Alles nur nach Gottes willen (BWV 72). In English that would be "Everything according to God's will alone." 

I stopped to think about it during the sermon. All is God's good will. I'm not always persuaded of this. I mean, some things absolutely suck and if that's God will, I'm on the losing end. How do I see beyond that?

"Alles, alles" -- "all, all" -- are the words that echo through the cantata's opening chorus. Singers are handed notes --  a sudden D-sharp, an unlikely B-flat -- that leave you with no idea of where the harmony is headed. Ha, ha, Herr Bach -- is God's will capricious? It felt that way, struggling to learn this chorus in just two rehearsals. Or is Bach telling us who we are, adrift, not knowing where things are headed and that God's will is more than we can understand, beyond the numbers we enter into an algebraic equation or the clicks that feed a social media algorithm? How did this all feel to the people in the pews in the 18th century, when the Leipzig occasionally had to worry about invading Turks and all the ordinary maladies that killed infants and small children?

I don't know. This year, 2026, is already a turbulent one, with a federal ICE agent murdering a mother of three in Minnesota and the rest of them rampaging on, bullying immigrants and wine moms in communities where citizens and non-citizens try to live together in peace. Where the president of the United States wants to take Greenland away from Denmark. 

Perhaps I, bruised by life, should shrug my shoulders and acknowledge that this is a world where the strong inevitably consume the weak. But somewhere in my Lutheran education or a lifetime of churchgoing, in some reading about the Kingdom of God or in a light-dawning recitation of the Lord's Prayer, something took root. When I see charts and diagrams that show zero-sum thinking fails to explain the way the economic world is working, I smile and praise God. 

10 dents per inch in a 22-inch reed equals 220. Sleyed 2 threads per dent with 28.5 empty dents.  That's 383 warp threads wound and soon to be threaded in 11 repeats of 32 threads plus 1 for balance and 15 threads either side for straight-draw selvages. It's math now, it'll be cloth someday soon.