Our lives are like a quilt. There is a pattern that we all notice and put together it has such beauty as a whole,

but each quilt has a patch that just doesn’t seem to belong. That is also like life. We all have patches in our life where we have slipped, fell from grace and were not the perfect individual. We all have the dark skeletons of deceit and lies. Lies to our loved ones, lies to our friends, but the darkest ones are the lies to us.

Why do these dark patches have to exist?

Contrast.

For each life quilt, you can show the greatest patches of success and the patches of happiness. But if those patches are never challenged, never demanded, never tested… is it really a quilt of life at all?

A true quilt of life has those patches of bright colors and happiness, the colors and situations of success. Graduation from High School, the first time you walked to the first time you rode a bike, patches that show your deepest joys and happiness.

Then you have the patches of despair, the patches of darkness. So dark are these patches that the patches cannot be read most of the time. To most people the patches of dark are those that are hidden deep inside each other’s souls.

I have a friend who couldn’t let the pain of her being raped out. Her life quilt was slowly becoming darker and darker as she became darker and darker slipping into the depths of depression and agony. Her anger consumed her. Her inability to deal with this anger drove her family, her friends and her husband away. Her anger was the darkest I have ever experienced as a man.

But I saw the glow that was once deep inside her. The glow that shown so brightly when she was given one of her favorite flowers not a rose, nor a carnation but a simple daisy brought a smile to her face.

With that smile a new quilt patch was put on her fabric of life. A patch of a simple daisy that brought her back from the darkened path that she was on. The man that gave her a flower was worried about her and couldn’t afford a rose or a carnation. And that’s what brightened her day. For it wasn’t the amount of the gift that mattered but the thought that changed her thoughts on men completely.

She went from a woman who mistrusted all men, dark, cold and hateful to a woman fueled with passion and love. The friend I thought I would never see again I saw walk down the aisle with the one true love in her life.

And she was made whole again.

I’ve watched people on the tops of the world, fabric brighter than I have ever thought to be, fall into a pit of despair. A pit that he brought his own shovel to dig and dig he did. Continuing to dig his own grave until he literally got in and shoveled the dirt on top of himself.

He saw no out as I have mentioned before and he took what he thought was the last one available to him. I watched a man I respected sit on a cold slab as friends and family passed by.

For though others saw him as someone who fought his battle with despair and tragedy, I saw a man who gave up. I saw not the hopes and new dreams of a new opportunity but a man who was putting his house in order. A man who was ready to die was what I saw. I saw the pain in his heart and soul and yet there was no solution, no miracle, and no words that I could say that could take him from this patch of death.

We all collect the patch of death on the quilt of life. It’s ironic that we hurry our entire lives to get where we’re going, but the police and society lets us run the lights as they take us to our grave.

The fabric of our life quilts are all made alike, some of us have opportunities that others do not. But we all start with the same single patch that either fades or brightens in our life.

The patch of hope.