I’ve been crocheting a blanket for three months now. It’s supposed to be a gift. It was supposed to be done by Christmas. And every time I pick it up, I notice the mistake I made about forty rows back — a stitch that’s slightly off, a place where the tension changed because I got distracted by something my kid said.
Here’s the thing: I could rip it all out and start over. I could try to make it perfect. But the blanket is warm. It works. And the person I’m making it for won’t love it because every stitch is flawless — they’ll love it because someone sat in a quiet house after the kids were asleep, hook in hand, and made something for them.
I think about this when I read John 1:14.
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
John doesn’t say the Word became a concept. He doesn’t say God sent a message or dropped a rulebook from heaven. The eternal God — the one who spoke galaxies into existence — became flesh. Moved into the neighborhood. Took on skin and hunger and exhaustion and all the mess of being human.
That word “dwelt” in Greek is skenoo. It means to pitch a tent, to tabernacle. It’s the same idea as God’s presence filling the tabernacle in the wilderness — but now the tent is a human body. God didn’t stay at a distance and shout instructions. He came close enough to be touched.
And He came into a world full of dropped stitches.
That’s the part that wrecks me. Jesus didn’t wait until we had it together. He didn’t show up after we fixed ourselves. John says He came to “His own” — and His own didn’t even recognize Him. He entered a world that would eventually kill Him, and He came anyway.
If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of energy trying to present the finished blanket to God. The clean version. The version where the stitches are even and the edges are straight. But grace doesn’t wait for the finished product. Grace shows up at row forty-two when the tension is all wrong and says, I’m staying anyway.
John 1:16 says from His fullness we’ve received “grace upon grace.” That phrase in Greek literally means grace replacing grace — one wave rolling in before the last one has even receded. It’s not a one-time deposit. It’s a continuous, relentless supply. I actually unpacked the Greek behind this phrase in a short video — you can watch it below.
So tonight, if you’re sitting with something unfinished — an unfinished blanket, an unfinished prayer, an unfinished version of yourself — remember that the God who created everything chose to dwell in the incomplete. He tabernacled in a fragile human body in a broken world.
He’s not waiting for your perfect. He already came for your mess.
Something to think about: Where in your life are you trying to “finish the blanket” before you let God in? What would it look like to invite Him into the unfinished version?
I actually unpacked the Greek behind this phrase in a short video — you can watch it below.
If this resonated, stick around — there’s more coming.