...The stitches were all wonky. I could tell it was something to do with the bobbin. I rethreaded the machine, cleaned out some fuzz from around the bobbin casing, tried sewing again, got the same wonky stitching, rethreaded the machine again, tried again... Then -- oh, duh. I had threaded the bobbin wrong.
The spiritual lesson seemed pretty evident. God has a certain way mapped out for us to live. Jesus must be fully Lord. We must be surrendered to Him and living in obedience and trust. This is the only way the Christian life will work the way it's meant to. If we "thread the machine" some different way, we'll keep getting results that are not what our Designer intended. The results may even look pretty to us. But to Him they are the result of a malfunction, and are useless.
I've been wrestling with Jesus a lot recently. I want to know first-hand how the Christian life works, but I can't get my understanding second-hand, from Oswald Chambers, Charles Price, or anyone else. God can use the lives of people who have learned the secret of the Christian life to make me desperately thirsty to step into this secret myself, but their wisdom won't give me wisdom. God can also put me into situations where the "stitching" of my life gets messed up, and I am driven to seek Him intensely and repeatedly, yearning to know what it is He wants to show me.
Godly examples and my circumstances have worked together to bring me to wrestle with God. Wrestling is intimate, as Beth Moore said recently; "wrestling" and "embracing" apparently even come from the same root word. More on this later, but back to bobbins:
It's His way, or wonky results that He can't even use. My call.