Buttons, Blog Posts, and Prayer Ideas

When I was a child, I loved my grandmother's button box.  I'm sure it baffled her.  My grandmother came of age in the Depression.  She would patch and repair a piece of clothing, and once it was no longer usable, she'd cut off the buttons and save them.  She sewed much of the family clothes, and buttons came in packs that included more buttons than she needed.  She saved them.

She didn't see them as objects of beauty, the way that I did.  She didn't understand why I loved to run my fingers through the buttons or let them fall out of my hands in a stream. 

She saved more buttons than one seamstress would ever use in a lifetime.  This morning, I came across this idea in this post that uses buttons as a prayer device.  It's geared towards children, but as with many good ideas, it could be used with a whole congregation.

On Sunday, I wove a piece of yarn through the prayer loom and reflected that I was seeing new yarn there.  For awhile, I wondered if I was the only one who used it.  But clearly, I'm not.  That idea, too, was one I first discovered in a post on the Internet.  For more on how we used it with VBS children, see this blog post.  For more on how we used it for Maundy Thursday, see this blog post.

This morning I am grateful for all the great ideas that are out there, just waiting for us to discover them.  I'm grateful that we're integrating different ways of prayer into our worship services.  When I was young, they'd have been limited to retreat exercises or camp.

I'm also missing my grandmother and her button box.  Even though I now have a button box of my own, I wish I had hers too.