Ministry of the Puzzle: Work the Pieces

I initially wrote about the Ministry of the Puzzle three years ago. In that post, I gave eight insights I gained from working on jigsaw puzzles with my family. During the winter, we like to construct jigsaw puzzles to pass the time indoors. While we have constructed large thousand piece works, we decided to start this seasons puzzles with some smaller challenges to prep us for the two thousand piece puzzles we were planning to do.

The two thousand piece puzzle we were going to start was actually the same puzzle that inspired the post from three years ago. As I wrote in the post, it was the sixth puzzle we had worked on that winter. At that point, we were about puzzled out, but we didn't know it. In any case, as the days grew longer, our interest in finishing the puzzle grew shorter and we eventually took it apart and put it back in the box. 

This was in perfect alignment with the lessons Take your time and Go with the flow. That puzzle did not want to come together back in 2018. It's time was 2021. How do I know? Because we put it together in eight days. And in those eight days, the Lord honed in on a specific lesson: Work the pieces.

Puzzle pieces are a very simple thing. They are made of cardboard, laminated with an image, and cut into a specific shape. The pieces create the challenge, and the more pieces there are, the greater the challenge. In order to overcome the challenge, you have to work the pieces. If you leave them in the box, the puzzle will not come together. If you don't try to put them together, they will not form the final picture. There is a lot of trial and error with putting the pieces in place, so you have to exercise patience. 

You also have to be humble. Intricate puzzles have lots of pieces that look the same and fit together, even though they don't go together. As you work the pieces, you may need admit to yourself that the piece you worked so hard to find and put into place ultimately does not belong there, as evidenced by the piece in your possession that does. 

This happened repeatedly throughout this process and every time, the Lord pointed it out to me. "You have all the right pieces, you just haven't put them in the right places. Take them out and allow the correct pieces to fit in," He seemed to say. It humbled me every time, because it was super annoying to think that I had finally finished a section only to discover that it had to be reworked and I didn't need to get an attitude about it. If I wanted to finish the puzzle, I had to accept that pieces had to be moved. I also had to accept the lesson God was teaching me, which in all honesty, was what was actually annoying. I didn't want to accept that I had put the pieces in my life in the wrong place. But just like when you take out the wrong pieces, the right ones easily fall into place.

Ultimately, we have all the pieces we need to work the puzzles of our lives. 2 Peter 1:3-4 says, "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire." 

The Lord has equipped us by His power to live our lives according to the divine nature. We can work out our salvation (Phil. 2:12-13) and trust that our purpose will be fulfilled (Phil. 1:6).