A girl kneels at a table in a warm sunny room. The stillness is wonderful, all that can be heard is a gentle sifting as the girl sorts through the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The Lord is the creator of the jigsaw puzzle of life (Gen 1:27). He has designed and cut every piece and sees the whole picture as He designed it to be.
The girl works on her puzzle. First, she concentrates on finding all of the corner pieces and straight edges; those pieces of the puzzle that are easily found and put into place. The corners and straight edges represent the boundaries in our lives. These straight edges represent the normality of our everyday lives; the things that we have certainty about or expectations of. This is the stuff of life that we think is set and that we don’t need or desire God’s help with.
God knows how we try to complete our puzzles by ourselves and without His help. We start with the straight edge pieces. We don’t delve into the middle of the puzzle where we have no frame of reference. Yet, You O Lord know us completely. You have our individual designs in mind before the world was created (Eph 1:4). Where we only see the external, You see from the inside out (1 Sam 16:7). Every part of us is known intimately by You (Psalm 139:13).
The girl has found all the straight edges and now can only see lots of darkly coloured pieces. In the puzzle of our lives the dark pieces signify pain, wounds and grief. God knows what part of our lives they represent. When we see only darkness, He can see how they fit into our greater picture, bringing definition and shape.
The girl shifts her position and shuffles the pieces around the table again with her palm. This time she starts to select the nondescript tones of beige. This seems to take ages, her downcast sighs speaking of her frustration and boredom. These pieces are the desert times, moments of feeling abandoned and alone. Those times when we are stuck, we can’t hear God and when whatever we try to do fails. There is no inspiration, no excitement, nothing new, just emptiness with life feeling like a barren wasteland.
What about all those sky-blue pieces? The endless blue of the vast sky, where everything seems the same. These are the parts of our life we just don’t understand, “and no matter what we do we just can’t work out where our pieces fit; where we fit in. We can look and look and look but all to no avail, all we see is just confusion and doubt.
Yes, all of us move the pieces of our lives around and around desperately trying to make them fit but putting the pieces into the wrong spaces. This is when we try to squash ourselves into spaces when we know that we really don’t fit!
The girl lifts her head, a man has come and he offers to sit with her and help her as she is working on her puzzle. The man, a representation of our strong yet gently loving Father desiring to spend time with his beloved child. A joyous picture of Jesus, our friend who shows us the way. An example of the work of You, Holy spirit, coming alongside of us. Encouraging us and revealing God’s plan for our lives.
The girl now works together with the man towards completing her puzzle, piece by piece.
Our lives obviously aren’t as simplistic as a flat 2D wooden puzzle with just a front and back. Our lives aren’t even like those 3D puzzles that form a shape like a sphere or a building. We are created with trillions of pieces on multiple layers, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual.
It is only when God shows us a bigger view of our life puzzle that we can really begin to see where we fit. God helps us replace the pieces where He purposely designed them to go. The puzzle pieces then slot into place with such ease and another part of the picture of our lives becomes crystal clear.
Our lives are puzzles that can only be completed with Jesus. For you see we all have a piece missing. Jesus is the missing central piece. The piece that only HE can fill.
This piece of our puzzle was lost at the beginning of time but is now found in Him. It is only by choosing to let Jesus fill that place in our picture that our lives make any sense.
Our completed pictures reveal history. The return to a relationship with God – our Father, saviour and guide, who longs for us to see ourselves whole and full of Gods glory. Our lives reflecting the designer who made us.
