Patriarchs: Living the Puzzle of Life

 

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you. Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing.

 How do you feel about puzzles? Me, I love them! And not just jigsaw puzzles, either. I love logic puzzles and math puzzles and sudoku and picture puzzles. I have an app, Puzzle Pages, that I use on my phone almost every day. In fact, it’s the only game I’ve had a paid subscription to for years. At bed time, this is how I wind down, how I start to shut down my brain, I break out a puzzle!

 I do, also, enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles. I often do them with my daughter, in fact I’m hoping to do that this week when she visits. We’ll clear everything off the coffee table and put the puzzle felt* on it. I set up the box in such a way that we can both see the picture easily and then we break out the puzzle sorting boxes* my son got me for Christmas a few years ago and start sifting through for the edge pieces, because that’s how civilized people do puzzles (or so my Mom taught me). My husband, the barbarous man, just starts anywhere. He grabs a piece out the box and just puts it down, magically finding where it goes. That’s not for me. I like a plan, a path, a clear direction. As we’re looking for the edge pieces, the corner pieces will appear and we’ll compare them to the picture on the box to figure out where they go, giving our puzzle direction, much like the cornerstone I wrote about earlier.   

 One year, on our anniversary trip to the beach, my husband and I worked on a very unusual puzzle called “Lost in a Jigsaw.” I searched extensively and I don’t seem to have any pictures of it, nor is it available for purchase outside of ebay anymore. What was different about it? This puzzle didn’t have a picture! It was designed around a hedge maze built on the diagonal. There was a picture on the back to give you an idea of how it would go together, but that picture was assembled incorrectly on purpose. As we went along, we had to find pieces with similarities that we could group together. We did eventually finish it, but it was HARD!

 What really bugs me, though, is when you get all the way through a puzzle and find out you are missing THE LAST PIECE!!! This happened to us with a brand new puzzle we bought in London to help us commemorate our trip. To this day I have no idea what happened to that piece. We tore the living room apart looking for it for days! All I can figure is that it was package that way. How cruel is that?!?

 My absolute worst experience with a puzzle, though, had to be last year’s Christmas puzzle. Many (not all but most) Christmases I’ve bought a puzzle to put together. In the past, we’ve often done it as a family at the beach house after Christmas. Last year, I found a really fun-looking puzzle at Hobby Lobby that I grabbed to put together with my daughter. My youngest son and my husband actually joined in on the “fun” too! Fun is in quotes there because this puzzle WAS NOT FUN. In fact, I think it may have caused actual puzzle trauma! First off, the puzzle was super difficult to put together. So many of the pieces looked exactly the same, both in the sky area and the snow. Then there was the problem that multiple pieces would fit together. Like two or three different pieces would go into the same spot, so you could never be sure you quite had it right. Then came the final straw. At one point, a glass of water was spilled on the puzzle and, although it was mopped up quickly, enough water had saturated the puzzle felt that the puzzle itself became soaked. When I realized it the next day I tried to dry it by blowing a fan on it, but to my horror, the pictures on the pieces became detached and started blowing off! First one, then another. I started gluing them back on the pieces, but at one point a dozen or so blew off at the same time and I just quit. I’ve never quit on a puzzle before, but that was as far as I would go!

 What does ANY of this have to do with Abram you are probably wondering? Well, the devotional from Love God Greatly today shared, “Abram shows us what radical faith in God looks like. God doesn’t have to spell everything out in order for us to trust Him. More than likely, He is only going to give us one piece of the puzzle at a time.” This got my brain thinking about puzzles, how I like to go about doing them, and how that relates to life. You see, if given the choice, I’d like to have a simple puzzle with a picture that I could sort into nice little boxes and put together in the proper order. Sometimes in life this happens, though not very often to be fair. More often I am faced with a puzzle that I have to put together piece by piece without a picture, like with Lost in a Jigsaw. In fact, most of the time in life it feels like God is just giving me one piece of the puzzle at a time. Sometimes it’s a side piece that I can see immediate how it relates, but sometimes I think I’m holding piece for the puzzle that doesn’t have a spot yet, that has to wait for more pieces to come together before it can find its place. Charlie Brown taught me that even when I can put things together my way, with the picture and the sorting boxes and the edge pieces and everything, even then sometimes it doesn’t work out the way I thought it would. Sometimes the puzzle ends up in the trash can and we are left feeling unfulfilled and sad. I’m working through a season of life like that in a tragically broken family relationship.

Here's the Thing: I believe in a God that can redeem even the horrible Charlie Brown puzzles of life! Maybe He’ll teach me a lesson from this life situation like He did from that puzzle.

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