Our Story

You probably know the first part already.

I. The leaving

Nobody makes a decision. That's the part people get wrong about it. You don't stand up one Sunday and announce anything. You are sixteen, and there is a match on, and then there is a term at university, and then it has been four years and the language has gone strange in your mouth. If you had to explain what happened you couldn't, because nothing happened. That was us — both of us, separately, before we ever met.

II. The unexpected blessing

What brought us back was not an argument. Nobody has ever been argued into this. It was finding out we were going to be parents — which we had not planned, and which frightened us more than we admitted to anyone at the time. Not the nappies. The other thing: that a person was going to look at us for guidance, and we had none. We had opinions. We had no inheritance.

So we went back, slowly, the way you'd walk into a house you grew up in. Not because we'd won an argument with ourselves — because we needed something bigger than we were and we had run out of substitutes.

That child is the best thing that ever happened to us. Coming back is the second, and we would not have had the second without the first. We have never once managed to explain that as a coincidence.

And here is the strange gift of having left: you come back with your eyes open. You can tell the difference between what is holy and what is merely churchy. You have no patience left for anything decorative.

III. The stall nobody stopped at

Our eldest saw it before we did: a crochet Jesus, sitting on a trestle table at a farmer's market. Hand-made. Genuinely beautiful — hours of somebody's work in every one of them.

And nobody was stopping. Every other table in that market had a queue and this one had nothing, and we stood there long enough to work out why. The only answer we could find was that it was Christian, and that was enough to make people keep walking. That broke something in us, quietly. We bought the plushie. It is still in our house.

But we talked about that stall the entire drive home — because if that maker was invisible, then so were hundreds of others. All making good, honest things, with nobody to send them a single customer.

And it matters more than one market stall. This is how faith gets handed down — not in arguments, in things. The medal your grandmother wore. The Bible with someone else's handwriting in it. The object outlives the sermon, every time, and the object is what your children will actually hold.

IV. So we started looking

We got obsessive about it. Farmer's markets. Church gatherings around the States. A bindery in Ohio we found through a friend of a friend. We started asking every maker we met who else we ought to be talking to, which is how most of it happens now — one person hands us to the next. We bought things and lived with them and sent half of them back.

People started asking us where we'd found things. Then they started asking us to find things for them. We ran a stall in our own community for a while, which is the best education in this there is — you cannot oversell anything to a person who will see you next Sunday.

This shop is that, made bigger. Nothing else has changed. We still find things one at a time. We still write down why. Our name is still on it.

V. Which brings us to you

You are probably here for someone else. A godchild. A friend having the worst year of her life. A son being confirmed who would rather not talk about it. You want to say something and you'd like the object to say it for you, because it will say it better and it will still be saying it in thirty years.

That is the whole job. We find the thing; you give it; someone keeps it. We were chosen long before we came back, and so were you — and everything worth having in this shop is worth having because someone intended it for someone else.

Our own family is still growing. Coming back has made every part of our lives better than it was, which is not a thing we'd have believed at nineteen, and it is the only news we have worth sharing.

Come and see what we've found this week.