Plastic bags carry our groceries and our trash, but a church group in Abilene is using bags to carry a little bit of hope. They’re crocheting the bags into sleeping mats for homeless veterans. The mats will provide comfort. But one woman finds purpose in making the mats, even though crocheting is painful because she has a physical disability.
I hop up into the passenger seat of Kelly White’s pickup truck as we head to local grocery stores to collect plastic bags. She explains how she and the other women cut the plastic bags into rolls of plastic yarn or plarn so they can crochet them. The group of women from Pioneer Drive Baptist Church found the idea for the mats on Pinterest. It takes about 500-700 bags to make one mat.
We walk into United Supermarkets, pick up bags from a recycle station by the door, and head back to the car.
“In this case it’s something tangible,” Kelly said. “It’s something usable. And I’ll be honest, I’m not the richest person in the world. I really don’t have a whole lot for me to give. But I can give what I have. I actually just learned how to crochet last week. Because I have rheumatoid arthritis it’s hard for me to do a whole lot with my hands anyway.”
We walk into Market Street and ask an employee where to find plastic bags. She leads us to the recycle station and we take all the bags.
As we get back in the car, Kelly adjusts a handicapped tag on the dashboard. The 31-year-old customer service representative doesn’t look sick, but she suffers from an autoimmune disease.
“2011 was my bad year,” Kelly said. “Right about that time my medicine quit working and I was stuck in bed for 9 months. Parents literally did everything for me. There was one night where I’m like ‘Why am I lying here?’ My thought process was, I’m going to be doing my family a favor. It would just be so much easier if I’m gone. So I grabbed my gun and my bottle of pain pills and I’m like ‘Okay, God, ready or not, here I come.’ Dropped my pill bottles on the floor and you forget that I can’t get out of bed. Grabbed my gun and I was not strong enough to pull the trigger. Couldn’t do it.”
Kelly explains how she found a reason to live through her faith in God and the support of her church group.
“What gets me excited is something like this where it’s simple and I can do it and I can be a part of something bigger than me,” Kelly said. “Who would’ve thought that plastic bags could bring joy?”
We come to our last store, grab the plastic bags from the recycle station and head back to the truck. The backseat is now filled with hundreds of plastic bags which will be turned into 10 sleeping mats for the Stand Down for homeless veterans event next October. With the help of an ergonomic crochet hook and the support of her group, Kelly will be sharing her own hope with veterans.