Puzzling.

I love finding puzzles to do in the summertime with my kids because it’s a great way to bring them all together. Since we have been stuck locked down – I got a puzzle. This one is kind of hard; the proportions are off and the border is all very similar. We all have an idea of what we want it to look like, but we have been struggling with the connectors. How do we get object A to fit next to object B? We have whole sections completed in isolation, but they are out there on their own with nothing anchoring them to the edges. Sometimes we even make mistakes and try too hard to connect pieces that are very close to fitting, but not quite right, and we force it because we think we know the way.

Life is like that too.

Often we have a really great idea or set of ideas about what our eventual goals are or where we want to be in x number of years, but how to get there has eluded us. Sometimes we work around some great idea only to find that we have forced some aspect of our dream or goal, and it will not work. It’s back to the drawing board. Over the years, we may have amassed a whole set of disparate skills in the hopes of being able to use them for our end, yet sit waiting and waiting while the skills lay idle because we have not yet reached the point of being able to use them for our goals.

Sometimes life is like putting a puzzle together without knowing what the picture at the end is at all. We spend countless hours trying to sort the pieces, to make sense of the puzzle, only to find that we must painstakingly find piece after piece for quite some time before we even have an inkling of what our lives will end up looking like.

That can be discouraging.

Where do I fit?

Is this piece important?

Where am I going?

How will it all end?

Thankfully, we have a heavenly father who loves and cares for us, who knows our plans, but more importantly, knows His own. A God who knows what our finished picture should look like, and He gently leads us to its glorious completion when we follow Him.

I am thankful that I don’t always have to know the bigger picture, because sometimes, even when I think I do, I’ve been wrong, or have no idea how to get there. I am thankful that my God supplies all the pieces for the puzzle of my life. He certainly doesn’t promise that it will be easy, but if we follow his direction, we are sure to create something beautiful.