PUZZLE

Two hundred more t-shirts arrived yesterday, so the girls and I were busy sorting and separating.  The one thing I like about passing them out is that I get to visit with many people that I never see.  One of my childhood friends and I were visiting about old times and our lives today.  She put a great perspective on life; she looks at it like a jigsaw puzzle.  Some of the pieces are edges and corners, these are the ones that fit easily together and you know exactly where they fit.  Some pieces are more difficult.  You aren’t certain where they go and you will try over and over again to fit them in a certain spot.  Some pieces will be light, but some pieces will be dark.  Some pieces bring joy while others bring sorrow.  Your life may be a puzzle of 1000 pieces, while others may have a life of only 100. 

It doesn’t matter what we think about our life puzzle we have a limited number of pieces to fit into the boundaries of the edges.  Our life puzzle will be completed at some point in time, no matter where we are in fitting our pieces together.   All the pieces good and bad have to be there to have the finished picture.  If we missed a piece our puzzle will never be complete. 

When working this jigsaw puzzle of life we will have different techniques.  Must like a normal jigsaw puzzle we all begin with the framework, the edges.  This is what is the easiest.  We then move into the not so easy portion of our lives.  When we go to God for direction is when our pieces will fit together easily.  It is when we turn from Him that the pieces are more difficult and we become frustrated trying to fit mismatched pieces together.  All of our efforts will be wasted when we try to control what pieces fit together. 

Are you on your fiftieth piece of life or your tenth?  Are you going through a dark hard to fit piece or a light edge piece?  No matter what part of your life puzzle you are dealing with know that the Lord has all the pieces in His hands.  Just like the creator of a jigsaw puzzle created the end picture first, the Lord created the picture of us.  He knew from the beginning what we looked like and what our life puzzle looked like.  We were born to live out our puzzle.  He see’s the puzzle, He see’s all the pieces, He knows where they fit, and He see’s the end product. 

Ephesians 1:5-6New International Version (NIV)

5 he[a] predestined us for adoption to sonship[b] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.