Pieces of Puzzles

Forrest Gump may have said, “life is like a box of chocolates (you never know what you are gonna get)”, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that life is like a puzzle- you spend your whole life putting the pieces together and trying to figure out what the image is supposed to be.

We see the individual pieces all sitting on the table and we try to make sense of them. We desperately want to know how they will eventually fit together to make the picture come alive. We see our passions, our dreams, our hopes, our goals, and we want to know how they will all work themselves into the fabric of our story. How we can mold them and sew them together?

We want to know what the picture is going to be. We want to see the end result. The point of a puzzle is to create the picture, right? Why would you buy a puzzle if you aren’t going to put it together? We spend day after day in prayer and asking “God what do you want me to do with my life?” What is my calling? My vocation? What does this mean? Where am I going? For the love of you…what do you want from me?" I see bits and pieces sitting on the table and I can make out a general idea of what this might look like but I need some clarity and vision (unlike a puzzle, life doesn’t come with a box that has the whole picture already painted on it- that would be really nice…. Or would it??)

And so, we get to work. We see colors and shapes and pieces of the whole. We start organizing and arranging. Pieces of similar colors go together, edge pieces are moved to one pile. Everyone has their own tendencies of how they put a puzzle together- what they think works best for them.  Some of us prefer to work on puzzles alone, forgetting that in life (and often times with puzzles too) we are not the only ones at the table. Our loved ones, those who have worked their way into our stories, are also trying to put their own puzzled lives together and we often find our puzzle pieces getting mixed up with theirs which often makes things a bit more complicated but all the more beautiful at the same time.  

So after we get organized, we start to try to put a few pieces together. Unfortunately sometimes the pieces we thought would be the easiest to fit don’t. We swear they are supposed to fit together. We force them to line up and they just don’t feel right. We realize that we are different. We don’t easily fit into the mold that has been created for us (as women, daughters, sisters, Christians, pastors or even seminary students). That sometimes what the world tells us we are supposed to want we don’t. Instead we find ourselves longing for things that make no sense at all and yet we know in the very deepest fiber of our beings that they make all the sense in the world. We fight and struggle and push and pull, caught between our reason, our sense, and our hearts and we find it is to no avail. Sometimes we have to let a certain piece go before we can find the other piece that was right in front of us all along: the one that fits perfectly. Sometimes we have to change course, change direction, let one dream or hope die so that it can be resurrected or another one can be born.  Sometimes pieces that seemed to have fit together for a certain time suddenly don’t fit together anymore and we have to have the courage to start over, take things apart in order to rebuild them again in new shapes and forms. Relationships end. Loved ones die. Jobs are lost. Friends move far away. Doors are shut and we can’t seem to find the window that everyone keeps talking about. We have to face our fears of starting over. We have to face our disappointment and frustration and keep going. We have to let go of the expectations we create for life, relationships, experiences and let them be what they are- pieces of our story that can last for mere moments and yet change the course of our stories forever.

Sometimes we think we have the gotten things pretty well figured out. We have a good idea of what the picture is going to look like and then God throws another piece on the table that we weren’t expecting and we have to figure out how it fits in our already perfect plan- perhaps a piece that had accidentally fallen on the floor. We fall in love. Discover a baby on the way that wasn’t planned. We get offered an amazing opportunity to pursue something that we have always wanted. As amazing as this piece is, sometimes we find it a bit harder to reorganize the other pieces of our lives for it to fit and sometimes this makes us just want to stick with the picture we have got. We settle for less because we are scared of what could be. Risks are scary when we don’t know how they will change our lives… or break our hearts.

If life is about putting the puzzle together, we all too often fool ourselves into thinking that this means one day the puzzle will be complete. That one day (perhaps when we are old and gray) we will stand back and look at a finished product and see the big picture and understand it all. But the more time I spend putting this puzzle of my life together (and taking it apart and putting it back together again) I am starting to suspect that the whole point is not to reach the end product. There is not just one picture waiting to be discovered if we just spend enough time at the table or work hard enough. The point is to realize that there are many people at the table working on their own puzzles together with us. That we sometimes are called to leave our own puzzles aside for a while to join others in creating theirs. That God is in fact at the table with us helping us piece together our lives. And in the mean time, as we work- we laugh, we tell stories, we cry, we dance, we listen, we talk, and most importantly we love. The people who are sitting at the table with us are the ones that make putting the puzzle together worth it. That is the point.

So the next time we ask God what we should do with our lives, don’t be surprised if God pulls us up off our knees, opens our eyes to the life that is right in front of us- with all of its complications, messiness, joys, laughter, sadness, tears, and abundance- and says, “Go! Live! Keep creating. Keep piecing it together. Keep loving. Don’t be afraid to weave your stories and your lives with others. Don’t be afraid to pick up all the pieces and start over again. Don’t stop because you can’t see the big picture. Enjoy the process of putting this together and know that I am with you. Know that you are both deeply loved and capable of loving deeply. Know that the process of creation is more important than the finished product. In the end, that is what makes any puzzle, any story, worth putting together.