Tag Archives: delight

The Difficulty Before Delight

I recently experienced a phenomenon in our homeschool that offers great parallel truth for our spiritual lives. “Handiwork” is one of our school subjects, and for this year I wanted to focus on knitting, with a lesson once a week. One of the goals of formal handiwork instruction is that in time the students are able and eager to pick up that work whenever they desire during their leisure time. I learned to knit a couple of years ago, and I have found such delight in the occupation. It is both relaxing and rewarding to be in the middle of a piece of knitting work, slowly seeing an object begin to take shape with the repetition of every rhythmic click of the needles. To me, this creative occupation is a delight, and it is one that I wanted my children experience for themselves.

However, as you would imagine with 8- and 6-year-old boys, it’s a skill that doesn’t come without effort…tedious effort in the training of fine motor skills. In fact, for the beginner, especially children, the delight is not immediately experienced. There is some pleasure in being able to “cast on” a few stitches to begin a project, but then comes the part that my boys found quite challenging–learning to make the knit stitch. It is the most basic stitch in knitting. In fact, there are many different items one can make using the knit stitch alone. My boys were eager to create their first project, but they couldn’t even begin until they had learned how to make this basic, yet vital stitch.

They quickly became discouraged–and rightly so! To be able to make this stitch, you have to make your hands do several things simultaneously: hold the needles steady in each hand, maneuver the right needle through a stitch on the left needle, pull the working yarn taut with one finger while looping it round the needle, then pulling the wrapped yarn back through the same stitch and slipping it off the needle while holding all the other stitches steady and preventing them from flying off with the one. If you watch an experienced knitter working away, this looks easy as pie. But for the beginning adult, let alone a child, it is extremely hard! It requires such attention, precision, patience, gentleness–all virtues we want to develop in ourselves and our children–but also things that require great effort to attain. In short, the delight of knitting is delayed by the great difficulty of training fine motor skills and practicing patience and perseverance.

We had been working at the knit stitch for a few weeks. I had them watch some videos of people doing it over and over. I also explained and demonstrated it several times. But there are really no short cuts. They had to have the work in their own hands and keep trying over and over again, until they would get. In the lesson this past week, I was sitting at the table with both of them, my hands over their hands, slowly helping them work through each step. Gradually (and with a great deal of testing to my own patience), I was able to let go and let my 8-year-old make the movements himself, until finally he shouted in triumph–“I made a knit stitch!” What satisfaction was his! The thing that had been incredibly painstaking for so long only moments ago had suddenly brought great joy to his heart. In fact, as I had hoped, once he had made a few more stitches successfully, he was eager to spend some of his free time working on it again.

I probably don’t need to draw the parallel for you. As difficulty precedes delight in many rewarding occupations, just so with our own spiritual growth. There are painful seasons of hardship when we have to learn or re-learn virtues, where trust needs to be renewed, or when faith needs strengthened. Delight comes in our spiritual lives when we are able to rest in the love of our faithful Father and abandon ourselves to trust in his divine providence at work in our lives. But we don’t get there without effort, without difficulty. We will experience the tedious work of the spiritual life throughout this pilgrim journey, but we can be assured of the delight that will be ours in the presence of our Lord, as we continually seek his face and surrender to his loving, perfect will.

Copyright 2019 Jessica Ptomey

Intending (and Attending) to Delight


delight: “a high degree of gratification or pleasure: joy.”


Do you delight? Would you say that the moments in your home are marked with “a high degree of gratification or pleasure”? Is it a joy-filled atmosphere? Maybe that’s an overwhelming question.

I find myself plugging along in family life sometimes without often enough taking stock of the overall atmosphere, how well we are doing at keeping the big picture in the foreground. But if you are like me, when we do stop to consider a question like this, we get in over our heads. We mentally sort through the plans we have in place. But it is so much simpler to ask: how was yesterday?

So let’s just take yesterday. Did your family experience delight yesterday? If so (or if not), was yesterday a “typical” day in the life of your family? I think asking these two questions can give us a lot of clarity on the atmosphere of our domestic churches and help us live with more intention. Yesterday can help us determine how intentionally we are living.

So if we find that our yesterdays haven’t been what they should be, then we have the gift of today. In fact, if we find that our mornings haven’t been what they should be, then we have the gift of the afternoons. We don’t yet have the gift of tomorrow or next week. We cannot live those days with intention until they are given us. Remember that we have only been given this day so far, and it is the present day alone that we are able to live with intention. The thing I like about only thinking about today is that its not so hard, not such an overwhelming task. I’m simply purposing to be faithful with the time I have in this moment and to make this small bit of time filled with delight.

How can we intentionally create an atmosphere of delight in our homes today? Perhaps the following verses from the Psalms give us some inspiration and the key to being people who delight: Continue reading