Puzzling Matters

I have a husband who is a puzzle addict. It started small. 500 pieces or so. No big deal. A nice family activity as we sat together and completed the puzzle in one sitting. Then, one day while he was on vacation, he came home with a 1500 piece puzzle that took over our table and lives. Honestly, 1500 pieces! Well, we finished it (with the help of some friends on New Year's Day) and it felt good. There was a sense of satisfaction when it was all done. We put all the pieces back in the box and reclaimed the table for other activities...or so I thought.

The same friends that helped us with that puzzle brought us a new one! This one had the same amount of pieces and was by the same person, only it was a lot harder. That's it in the picture...a big mesh of buildings and trees! Everything seemed to blend together with many of the pieces similar in color. But oh, we were determined.

We settled in last weekend and finally finished it last night. That is, all but one piece. See it, missing in this picture? My DH looked and looked, but it is nowhere to be found. Our friends bought it second hand, so the piece could have been gone from the start, or it could have been lost somewhere here. (I do have 5 kids, after all.)

Why would I blog about such a insignificant subject matter as puzzles? I'm glad you asked! Yesterday when we were in the final stages of the puzzle, I was reminded of a sermon that our Pastor gave one day. As we walked into the sanctuary, each of us was handed a piece of a puzzle. He explained himself by sharing how ONE piece in our hands doesn't mean much, but all of them put together makes a beautiful, complete puzzle. (No, he didn't make us put it together, he just showed us a picture of it on the overhead.)

Anyway, there we were last night, trying to make some sort of sense out of all the green pieces we'd been staring at for hours, when my husband just smacked a piece down on the table and said with humor "There! It fits!" We both laughed as he tried to force the piece into the gap. As funny as that sounds, don't we do that with life sometimes? We come to a place of uncertainty, where everything looks fuzzy, and try to make - no, try to FORCE, something to fit? Not knowing where the pieces fit in can be very unsettling.

Other times, we pick up just the right piece and presto! It fits just perfectly. Regardless of whether the pieces seem to come together easily, or take a little more time and patience, (maybe with the help of a friend and some new perspective) there is one thing that I know to be true of life. God knows the big picture before we even begin to see it. He is like the picture on the box that we have to keep looking to in order to see the final picture. Look to Him when life seems puzzling. Things will fall in place eventually. Unlike our puzzle with one missing piece, God has all the pieces. And eventually, they will all come together to make the beautiful picture that He has created just for us to enjoy.

Psalm 139:16 (Amplified Version) "Your eyes saw my unformed substance, and in Your book all the days [of my life] were written before ever they took shape, when as yet there was none of them."