I hate puzzles, I hate having to sit there and figure out where each piece goes. It is just time wasted and quite boring to be frank. I would say the same for doom scrolling but I enjoy that all too much. But I digress.
The other day I was putting a puzzle together with my kids. Somehow, it seemed so much more fun with them… at some point they scurried off to watch cartoons, cause they understandably grew bored. I was left to puzzle by myself. Did I stop puzzling? No. And as I looked at the pieces on the table; some flipped right side up and others still upside down, something funny happened, I started actually enjoying the puzzle putting-together process. I was kind of confused about how much I was actually enjoying myself. Maybe it was the vibrant colors of the pieces that kept me enthralled by the burdensome task. And then, all of a sudden, God started talking to me. Ahah, That’s why I was magnetized to the horribly boring process. Believe it or not, He was also sitting at that table with me and helping me place the right pieces around the edges and the similar colored pieces where they might go in the middle of the picture. God then pointed out an interesting illustration. And no it was not the one on the box. There was a message in the mess I was organizing. As the chaos on the table started to unravel I realized that some of the puzzle pieces were, again, right side up — showing their colorful hints at where to place their piece…and other pieces were upside down where the blank abyss of the piece shown up at me, just daring to flip it over. I then heard the creator of the universe say to me, “look familiar?” LOL, God has a wonderful way of showing up in my life, very deliberately through metaphor and design and the beauty of nature. You might be seeing where I am going with this, but if you don’t…stay with me, I promise you, you will be blessed. I know I am.
See often times as we go through life, and we have these “puzzle pieces”, or if you will; experiences we go through. And with those experiences, we try to figure out how to place them into the right spot in our lives. We ask questions like, what am I suppose to do with this experience? What lesson should I have learned? God, what was the point of that? Why God Why? We try to understand the point to “that puzzle piece” or experience; to make it seem relevant or seem purposeful to our lives; or the full picture. Some pieces that fall out of the box have their part of the picture side up, giving is at least a little hint as where to put it. And then sometimes, the upside down/blank puzzle pieces, we have no idea what to expect. We have to flip that piece over to reveal another hint at how it all is suppose to work and come together. We almost might seem blind sided by those pieces or by the fact that two pieces that clearly looked like they should go together, absolutely have nothing to do with each in the grand scheme of the puzzle (AKA life)..or we are “blind, until we can see”. And just as you pour your puzzle pieces out and organize them on the table, ie experiencing life and making sense of it all, you try to find hints on how to put the pieces together. Instead of blindly trying to connect the edges together; fitting the interlocking pieces haphazardly to eachother, we have a hint to look at. That hint is the cover of the box. It all of a sudden lays out the answer to the chaos to which the pieces are held.
So….My question to you is, what is your puzzle box cover? How do you make sense of how your life is being put together? What helps you realize the illustration of life piecing together before you? What gives you the answers to the questions that leave us “puzzled”. Do you try to figure it out on your own? And if you do, I’m curious to know how is that working for you?
Want to know what I use? And what God wanted me to remember when I sat down at the table to reluctantly puzzle with my kids? I use God, I use Prayer, I use The Bible. I seek to find the truth of life through the Life Giver, the Designer of my life; the Creator; the One who knows the whole picture. And no it is not my mother or father.
We have a book that was curated for the world so that we knew how to live in it. The Bible.
The Bible teaches us how to put the pieces together, whether you think it does or not. You may live in a perspective that doesn’t use the Bible to direct your path…but I want to challenge you to have the perspective that it actually might direct you path inadvertently, even if you don’t think it does.
What I think to be true, is that somewhere in your life, whether you know of or not, the puzzle you have been dealt, has been put together by the influence of the creator and his love note to all of us.
Gods 1st and most important commandment to us is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). And then 2nd that “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).
Okay, so then what does it mean to love? Well, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16). So that means God loved all of the work and sacrificed his son? For love equals sacrifice. Even without reading the Bible, you have most likely loved someone or something so much that you sacrificed your ______, for them. A mother sacrifices her body or time or sleep for her children. And sports fan has sacrifice the amount of money it cost to go to a game to support their team.
We also hear that love that is not a feeling, but a choice. At a wedding ceremony the officiant will profess what love is…Believer or not, most can recognize that, “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant,” (1 Corinthians 13:4 CSB), from the Bible.
The Bible tells us how to put the puzzle pieces of love together. How are we to love God? Whether or not you have a relationship with God, you have to decide how to love your family, friends, or even the stranger on the street. I hope you would love them (or even me) with patience, kindness, without envy, or boastfulness and arrogance. Notice that Anger isn’t in that list of what love is or isn’t. So then how do we know why anger isn’t in that list. You could come up with a “logical” explanation, but that is the basis of that logic? There has to be a preconceived criteria. God is slow to anger. Wait what?! So what is the puzzle piece of anger all about?
“So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.”
(Luke 11:9 CSB)
https://bible.com/bible/1713/luk.11.9.CSB