Seams and wombats

 Last week I made myself a dress. The skirt part required  me to sew in two side pockets. I unpicked the first pocket several times before finally succeeding and deciding I would forgo pocket two. After gathering the skirt with three lines of running stitch I attached it to the bodice and overlocked the seam.  It fitted well and I tried slipping my hand into the right hand pocket. After a few failed attempts I looked down to check the whereabouts of my neatly finished pocket. The side pocket had disappeared. Further examination revealed that the pocket was sitting neatly above my buttocks in the style of a wombat's pouch. It transpired that I had sewn the skirt to the bodice with the side seams at the back and front instead of the left and right. After laughing quite a bit, I thought about the difficulty of lining up seams, and that led me to the virtue of a seamless garment such as the one Jesus had taken off him when he was crucified. We read about it in John chapter 19. "When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they put his garments into four piles, one for each of them, But they said "Let's not tear up his robe," for it was seamless. "Let's throw dice to see who gets it." This fulfilled the Scripture from Psalm 22 that said "They divided my clothes among them and threw dice for my robe." I was amazed once again that a prophecy from a Jewish book written seven hundred years earlier would be fulfilled by some Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross where Jesus carried away the sins of the world.