The Grandmother's Quilt at the Art Museum

In 2019, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts hosted an exhibition called Quilts and Color. Among the professionally curated pieces hung one quilt stitched by Rosie Lee Tompkins, a woman from Richmond, California, who never attended art school. She worked as a nurse's aide and spent her evenings cutting fabric scraps at her kitchen table, praying over every stitch.

Art critics stood baffled. Her quilts broke every rule of composition they had been taught, yet something about them stopped people mid-stride. One reviewer from the New York Times called her work "among the most miraculous creations I have ever seen." Trained artists with MFA degrees tried to reverse-engineer her technique and could not replicate it. Tompkins herself shrugged when asked about her method. "I just let the Lord guide my hands," she said.

The scholars saw fabric. Tompkins saw communion.

Paul tells the Corinthians that God's wisdom looks like foolishness to those who rely on human understanding alone. "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God." No amount of technical training could teach what Rosie Lee Tompkins already knew in her bones — that the deepest truths are not analyzed into existence but received, the way a hand receives thread, the way a heart receives grace.

The Spirit of the Almighty does not wait for credentials. He moves through willing hands and open hearts, creating beauty that no diploma can explain.