Recently I bought a jigsaw puzzle and sat down with my two
teenagers to put it together. It looked like a fun puzzle when I bought it but
it turned out to be a lot harder than I had originally anticipated.
The design repeated itself a bit in the puzzle which made it
difficult to figure out which part of the puzzle we were working on….
The pieces were very irregularly shaped. ..More so than
normal jigsaw puzzles. Some of the interior
pieces had straight edges, which totally messed with my OCD, since I am
admittedly one of THOSE people who insist on doing the border of the puzzle
first then the interior. There must be order to the chaos of a puzzle.
So we worked on this for a couple of days. When we were
almost finished, my son made a comment He said, “This would be impossible to
put together if you didn't have a picture to look at.”
That got me thinking about the parallels between our purpose
here on earth and the jigsaw puzzle.
1. Things aren’t always as we expect them to be.
Sometimes the pieces we have to put together in our life don’t come in the
shapes we expect them to. Sometimes we find the right piece for the trial we
are trying to solve in the most unexpected places.
2. There are patterns that repeat themselves.
Sometimes we don’t learn the lesson the first time, so we have to try again. We
might have a little more information the second time around, which may help us
find the right fit, but sometimes it just takes several attempts of trial and
error to figure stuff out. Sometimes all we have to go by is the shape of the
pattern to find the right piece.
3. There are always smaller pictures within the big
picture. If we only focus on the big picture, it can be overwhelming and we
want to give up because we think it’s just too hard. But if we focus on the
smaller pictures within the puzzle and put those together first, then it helps
us to better understand how the big picture will come together.
4. It’s important to understand where the
boundaries are, so you can focus on working within the boundaries. Otherwise
you might be spending all your time and effort in the wrong places.
5. The big picture is our guide on how to navigate
the little pictures and to know where the smaller pictures fit within our lives
and how all the smaller pictures connect to accomplish the larger goal. The big
picture can also serve as a measure of progress for us to know how we are doing
on the little things and can help us to understand what the ultimate purpose of
the “puzzle” is. As the little pictures come together, it gives us a sense of
accomplishment and joy to be able to look back and see how far we have come and
to see the beauty of how all of our given pieces have fit together to create
the portrait of our lives.
6. The picture isn’t complete without each and
every piece… each trial, each success, each person who has touched our lives,
each moment along the way. The puzzle is not ever complete if any one piece is
missing. So each moment of our lives is important in our own puzzle.
Without the ‘big picture’ in life (the gospel), it would be
nearly impossible to put together all the things we have to deal with and
accomplish during our earthly journey. It would be like trying to put a puzzle
together upside down without looking at the print. It would be difficult to
navigate and would be a lot more trial and error, a lot more frustration,
require a lot more time and we would miss out on the beauty of the finished
picture.
I can’t imagine trying to go through life without being able
to look at the big picture and let that help me figure out how everything fits
together.
