Tassel

When I develop apps I fall into deep sessions — hours where I'm just in it, several in a day. Then I look up and half the day is gone and God wasn't in any of it. He was there the whole time. I wasn't with Him. Nothing dramatic, just the ordinary way work closes over you and God slips out of view. That was the problem I wanted to solve: not a crisis of faith, just the quiet forgetting.

The answer came from somewhere I didn't expect. I'd been traveling in Japan, where the claw machines are everywhere and something of a national pastime, so I tried one. I'm bad at claw machines. I put in 1000 yen and got nothing. Inside was a little model of a Hiroshima tram — nice, but I wasn't chasing it. I'd just been losing, so I prayed. A small, almost embarrassing prayer: let me get something out of this.

A staff member came over. That's normal there — they help when they see you struggling. He reached in and shifted the prizes to make it easier. I still couldn't get anything. So he moved the tram right to the exit, so close it dropped before I put in another coin, and let me keep it. The help was ordinary. The extent of it wasn't. I got the prize without really trying.

No sign, no sermon, nobody who knew what I'd prayed — just a stranger doing his job, further than he had to. That was the answer. I'd asked for something that didn't matter, and God gave it through a man who had no idea he was part of anything.

The tram is at home now, and it does something I didn't expect: every time I see it, I remember Him. Not through any exercise. I just see it, and I remember His grace in something as small as a claw machine. It had been doing that for months. That was what stayed with me — an ordinary marked object can keep pointing you back to God long after the moment that gave it to you. That was the shape of the answer to my problem at the desk.

That's what Tassel is: you take an ordinary object you already carry or see all day and mark it on purpose, so that seeing it turns your mind back to God — especially where you tend to lose Him. The object doesn't hold God or summon Him. He's already with you; that never depended on the object. The mark just points to what's already true. It's an old pattern — God told Israel to tie a cord to their garments so they'd see it and remember Him. The seeing did the work.

What I watch for is that the object never becomes about me — a thing you keep because it makes you feel devoted. But there's nothing to do with a tassel: no streak, no count, nothing to show. You can only see it. And if a glance doesn't turn your eyes to God, it's just an object with a mark. It can't manufacture His presence, and it can't fake it. It only points.