Jigsaw Puzzles and Eternity

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.