A Puzzle

Sorry for the silence on the blog lately! It's not been for lack of desire to blog, but my schedule has been just a bit crazy, and will be for a couple more weeks. I'll be back as soon as I can, though! In the meantime, I thought I'd post something I wrote over the summer:

Puzzling Pieces

We live life the way we put together a puzzle—one piece at a time. As a puzzle takes shape, every single piece is important, even the boring ones. The design on each piece may not make sense by itself, but when you put it in its place, the complete picture is revealed. In the same way, isolated experiences in life may not seem to be significant, or to make sense to us, but without them, the whole design would not be complete.

Sometimes, there is a gap in the puzzle, for which you can’t find the right piece. You find one that looks like it might work, try to make it fit, and when it doesn’t, you are disappointed. It SHOULD fit—see how the design matches so well? You could leave it there, just because you think it ought to fit, but that will only tangle the whole scheme. If you wait long enough, though, you’ll come upon the piece that doesn’t just fit well, but fits perfectly. Nothing else could substitute for it. Whatever your idea might have been, it wasn’t as good as the designer’s. We may feel strongly that we have discovered something or someone to meet a particular need in our lives—perhaps it is not the ideal solution, but it will do. Yet our Designer does His work perfectly, not almost perfectly. If we refuse to settle for second best, and wait to see what He has in mind, things will come together seamlessly in the end.

Perhaps you come upon a piece that looks like it belongs to a particular part of the puzzle—the tree, perhaps, or the red wagon. But no matter how diligently you try to fit it into that spot, it doesn’t work. Suddenly, when you are putting together an entirely different area of the puzzle, your eye falls on that piece—and it’s just right. It did have a place, only not where you expected. There may be skills, relationships, or experiences that we had anticipated would fulfill a particular purpose in our lives, only to find out that they ultimately had an entirely different role. But in the end, we have to agree that the Designer knows best.

There’s one way in which life is not like a puzzle—we don’t have the picture on the puzzle box to refer to. Only at the end of our lives will we finally see how all things worked together for good, how the Designer brought a beautiful whole out of all the pieces. But it will be worth the wait, for then our sorrows will be turned into joy, our frustration into wondering admiration, and we shall see our lives, as mundane, confusing, and imperfect as they were, bringing glory to God.