How Does This All Fit?!

A couple days ago, we started a puzzle on the kitchen table. We’ve written before about puzzles and the beautiful metaphor they are for life.

Everyone has their own strategy for puzzles. Ours is simple. We go through the pieces find the edges, make piles of like-looking pieces, and then try to fill in the middle once the frame is put together.

It never ceases to astound me how small the frame (once the edge pieces are all connected) is in relationship to the spread-out pieces on the rest of the table. We have a pretty big dining room table and the individual pieces push at its edges when they are all laid out. Yet, the finished puzzle frame is less than a third the size of the dining room table.

It leaves me with one initial thought: how does this all fit?!

Crowded and Confused

We like to do puzzles that have buildings and people in them. When the pieces are all scattered about, you’ll get a blur and a blob in each piece that you can’t even make out what it is, much less where it belongs.

This reminds me of what it is like to live, day-to-day. It is easy to talk about vision and big-picture. Just like it is easy to see the beautiful landscape on our puzzle box. But when you spread the pieces out, it is confusing and blurry, and in some ways feels impossible.

We take a few days to do a puzzle. The pieces are spread out and a few always get knocked to the floor. We confuse an arm for a tree limb. It is an exercise in chaos and confusion. Puzzle pieces take up so much space. Much more than a finished puzzle image. The image is so neat and clean. But day to day, it feels like chaos. How in the world are all of these pieces going to fit together and resemble…anything, much less what they are meant to resemble?

The Magic of Persistence

There is always a point when I regret suggesting (or agreeing to) a puzzle. Just like there is always a moment when someone says, “I think a piece is missing!” If you are doing a big enough puzzle, there will be times when you stare at it for what feels like hours without landing a single piece!

It isn’t just the mess that make puzzles a good metaphor for life. It is the necessary persistence. The most important thing about puzzles is not giving up. Sometimes I feel like an idiot because I can’t find one specific piece (or any general piece!) to fall into place. Sometimes I sigh and need a break. Sometimes I get a headache from staring at this image and its chaotic limbs for so long.

All it takes to complete a puzzle is persistence. And not loosing the box! As impossible as it might seem, an accurate vision and a tenacious grit are all we need to make the most of life. It won’t be easy and sometimes we’ll wonder how in the world it all fits. But the joy of seeing things slowly click into place, the hope of measuring progress, is the joy we were created for.