As a girl, I spent hours each winter hunched over the table with my Grandma piecing together jigsaw puzzles. Step one was propping the top part against the wall so we could see the picture we were putting together. Then, we always started by sorting the edge pieces out and fitting them together until we had an open rectangle. Then we would sort the other pieces by color so we could work in similar areas at the same time.
Piece by piece. Bit by bit. We puzzled all 750 or 1,000 pieces together to form the beautiful picture adorning the top of the box.
In the end, we had a beautiful masterpiece, but when we started, we had a box of oddly shaped pieces, each one of them with just a fraction of the picture. In fact, looking at any one piece, we couldn’t even begin to imagine what the picture might be. Individually, a single piece might even look ugly like the brown water created when my children rinse their paintbrushes. But together they create beauty and wonder. It’s all part of the plan—all part of the big picture.
Daily Puzzle Pieces of Our Lives
In our lives, any given day is one piece of the puzzle.
Just a single piece of the puzzle.
It might not look like much.
It might be a mundane brown kind of day, or a crazy clashing colors sort of day.
It might be a drab grey day, or joyful yellow day.
It might be an angry red, or a peaceful blue.
It might not look like a piece we would want in our puzzle, or we might think we want all of the pieces in our puzzle to look just like it.
The Big Picture of Our Life Puzzle
But no matter what our puzzle piece of life looks like today, we have to trust that God has given us the right piece at the right time. Because in the puzzle of our lives as well as all of eternity, He is the only one who sees the big picture. He is the one with the box holding all the pieces and the pretty picture on the lid. He already knows the picture our individual puzzles will show as well how our puzzle fits into the bigger puzzle of eternity.
But we don’t see the big picture right now, and we don’t need to see it because we can trust that God is good. No matter what. We can trust that in his sovereignty he is working all things together for the good of those who love him.
No matter if our current piece doesn’t look all that beautiful.
Even if our current piece doesn’t look anything like we thought it should.
No matter if we can’t even imagine the picture He is piecing together.
We can trust God as he hands us each day. We can trust him as he says to each of us, “My child, this is your next piece. This is the piece that fits next.”
You see, it’s not our job to make our life into the beautiful picture we create in our heads. It’s our job to faithfully live each piece of the puzzle of life as He gives it to us and to trust him that the final picture will be a beautiful one that brings glory to his name.
