The Jigsaw Puzzle

The jigsaw is scattered over the table and shouts "holiday time". Its become a ritual when work stops and life stops between Christmas and New Year. I indulge in the luxury of being captivated, well maybe obsessed, with a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing too difficult you, understand, just a small puzzle – a 1000 pieces perhaps.  At first it always looks easy and I am convinced I am going to knock it off in a few hours.  I never do.

I spend hours poring over the thing – manipulating pieces, finding pieces, looking at the picture on the cover, trying the corner, then the middle, back to another corner.  I am not systematic and for a long time the puzzle looks chaotic.  I get frustrated and walk away, only to be drawn back again for another go. I can’t let it go.  It needs to be finished!

There are times when it seems life is like a jigsaw puzzle – scattered and chaotic – nothing making sense. A few pieces start to make sense and could possibly fit together, but how do they fit into the whole? My life appears to be a scattered puzzle too.  Unlike the jigsaw puzzle which comes in a brightly coloured box with a picture of the finished image, or even a wasjig with a picture that gives you enough clues to work it out, there is no completed picture that I can see. And, then, it hits me – if I am the puzzle, I cannot put “me” together.  I need someone bigger than me, someone who can see the whole picture not just the strange shapes, the odd few pieces. I need God! We are God’s workmanship, God’s creation created for His good purposes.  He is the mastermind. He sees the whole picture and one day when He is finished, I too will get to see the whole. In the meantime I learn to trust Him, to relax and allow Him to place one piece at a time – the brightly coloured and the dark shaded pieces, the unusual shapes and the things that don’t make sense – all things work together for good Romans 8:28 states for those who are called according to His purpose.  God has a purpose for this life, a good plan, an outcome. Learning to “let go” and trust Him is my response.

I first started writing about the jigsaw puzzle at Christmas time. Little did I realise that within a couple of months the jigsaw puzzle would be once again spread over the table as a means of coping with COVID 19 Level 4. As I ponder the impact of COVID 19 on us individually and collectively it looks like my puzzle. How can we globally make sense of this? Pieces scattered and divided. Questions piling on one another like so many pieces of a jigsaw. To be in lockdown, to come out of lockdown, to pick up the pieces of our lives again poses the questions – How? What? When? How will this look, what will be the new normal, when if ever, will things be the same? There seems to be no rhyme or reason or sense. What was, is gone, what is, is temporary and what will be, is a mystery. There is no picture from which we can find direction.  More than ever we need God.

As I turn to the Bible, I see other times when the world was in chaos, other lives scattered, broken in pieces yet men and women who had faith in the invisible hand of a loving Almighty Creator God saw the pieces coming together, the plan and purposes of God being outworked despite the devastation.  

We’ve just celebrated Easter in the midst of “lockdown”.  What amazing timing for the world!  Don’t you just get a sense that there is “Someone” who does know what is going on.  A God who is not distant and far off but a God who is intimately involved with us - this Emmanuel “God-with-us”. In the midst of the turmoil and the pain, God points us to the death and resurrection of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ and whispers to us , “See, I can make good come from suffering. I can redeem any situation and turn it to good.”  Trust Me!”

One day we will see the completed puzzle and understand.