Life's Puzzle

Lately I've found a great mental diversion in putting together on-line jigsaw puzzles. I was never one that spent a lot of time putting together one of those 500 or 1,000 piece puzzles. You need a lot of patience to master a puzzle. It was too frustrating for me because I always seemed to misplace a piece or two that was critical at the end stages. Just as I could see the picture finally come together, sometimes the missing pieces became the focus of the search and changed the purpose. No longer was the goal to finish the picture. Being unable to find the pieces changed it all.
My grandchildren help me with this new endeavor. On the computer, we don't have to keep up with the pieces. We drag them around with the mouse on the laptop and assemble the straight-edged pieces to frame up the picture that the puzzle will reveal. This is the easy part. Then we labor over the rest. The children (OK, and me included) often take a piece that we want to put into the puzzle but it just doesn't fit. Around and around we go inside the framed puzzle until I finally say, "I guess the puzzle's not quite ready for this piece." So we work as we wait until more of the puzzle comes together. And then we see it. We see the place for the piece. Everything fits. It all comes together.
Life is so much like a jigsaw puzzle. We work at getting our life framed up, considering our choices and selecting our options. We identify our borders, sometimes by trial and error, and we live out our existence within the boundaries. Some of life makes a lot of sense as the puzzle fits together very nicely. Then some things happen that do not fit within our frame. Our lives can be impacted with such grievous losses or we can be wounded so wickedly that the focus changes to the piece that doesn't fit the puzzle. It is time-consuming and even paralyzing. Whether it is disease or death or divorce or any of many life-altering tragedies, as we move through the sorrow of it all, we wonder what we will do with this piece that has our attention. The puzzle does not seem ready for the piece. Life does not seem ready for the loss. This painful piece does not fit.
In my younger days, I knew someone who was proficient at putting puzzles together and had this uncanny ability to "see" the places where the pieces fit before the rest of us could. We often called this person "Puzzle Master". Puzzles did not seem so challenging to the Puzzle Master.
When we don't understand the timing of events in our life and are bewildered at how it's all going to come together, we can take great comfort that we have Someone who knows what the completed picture will look like.
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
(Ecclesiastes 3:11)
God is an excellent Puzzle Master. Surrender that piece that doesn't fit or ask Him to help you find pieces that are missing. Trust me, the Lord can be trusted with the picture. He designed it. And it will come together in time.