Solving the Puzzle of Me

Today as I sat on my couch talking to Him, I stopped mumbling enough to listen to Him say this: “Don’t you see, Emily? It’s not about what I am in doing with you this year, or what I did last year, or what I’m going to do next year. It’s about you and Me. Forever.”

Three months ago my life took an unexpected turn. Again. I would like to say it was turned upside down but I wonder if it was upside down to begin with. I felt like my life was a jumble of odds and ends and I was trying to make sense of what to do with it all. Life is a puzzle with pieces that need to be put in the correct places or else it’s just awkward and incomplete. Without fulfilling the intended design of the puzzle the image produced will be distorted or in many cases, left unfinished. You may still be able to tell what picture lies on the puzzle but without each piece interlocking just so with it’s perfectly cut-out to match neighbor pieces, the puzzle will never get to communicate its full impact, its completed message. Many of us have set out to conquer that 1,000 piece puzzle found in the closet at our grandparents’ house. Driven by the pure boredom of a child forced to stay inside and be good as relatives chat about the weather and argue about conflicting details of certain memories, we sat down to attempt the puzzle. But how often did the puzzle get abandoned before it was finished? How often did we get distracted by our cousins playing outside? How often did we try so hard to make a certain piece be forced into fitting because it just seemed like the only option left? How many times did a younger sibling or a pet dog run carelessly by our masterpiece only to break up all our hard work and then we’d huff and puff in anger and blame all of our lack of puzzle success on said sibling or pet? And how many times did we get called away by someone else to pack up our unfinished endeavor back into the box because it was time to go?

I hope you see I’m not really talking about puzzles.

Our lives are composed of countless of choices, people, seasons, moments, habits, dreams, failures, successes, lessons, tears, and laughter. Each shaped by our personality, our tendencies, our aspirations, our fears, our experiences, and by how we chose to live out of our joys and our pains. Each piece is awkwardly shaped – unique and one of a kind. The key is figuring out how to combine, fit, and put together all those pieces right where they belong so we can produce a life of achieved potential, a life lived fully and completely, and a life that produces its intended statement. Our life is a box of puzzle pieces – a mixture of various elements, a heap of potential. Many of us remain that heap of potential and never manage to spill all of its contents on the floor and begin to construct its purpose. Some of us just manage to construct the flatten edged border of our lives; the parts with clear cut lines and boundaries but never venture into the wilds of the middle. And we have all in our quest of living life lost a piece and had to hunt around the room, under the sofas, under the tables to find that lost piece. If you’re like me then you usually find you’ve been sitting on the piece this whole time. A lot of us get deep into putting together who we are and how to live out of that, though some of us never get the chance to finish. We either start seemingly too late, get distracted along the way, or give up in frustration and lost ambition. And we all have at sometime let someone else help construct our puzzle. Not that engaging with other people is a bad thing, that is actually what we were made to do, but when we let other people, other circumstances, and other factors tell us who we are, what we look like, and how we should live, we end up losing the whole picture – the real picture.

Perhaps what I am saying doesn’t make sense at all. Perhaps it’s all just a bunch of cliché babble. But today at least for me, thinking about life this way makes it a little less daunting. It helps it makes sense a little better. Not that I understand it any better but I understand how to view it a little bit better. I fear I’m venturing into nonsense-cliché-ism again…

I think I’ve always view life merely as a path. You get on it and you just follow its line. Sometimes you get to a fork in the road and you have to make a choice. But nevertheless you just plow onward and onward hoping you didn’t make a wrong turn. I also viewed my life as a series of events: dots on a line or a graph that heightened, fell, and evened out. But most of the points are self-contained, they are specific instances, phases, seasons, stages, and individual features. Some spill over into others, and others affect some but it just is what it is and you just go along with it trying to make the best of it and hoping you’re making the right decisions.

Wow, I am really all over the place here. Much like my actual life I suppose. (There’s a double meaning in that. I’m clever, you know. Or at least so I’m told.)

But to bring it back to the beginning of my post, my life isn’t about a series of events, a series of milestones and decisions. It’s not about forks in the road or “this time of life” or “that time of life”. It is about the whole picture, the whole purpose, the complete intended design. So often I get stuck. I can’t see past a certain factor or situation. I get all consumed with just a few pieces of the puzzle and try to figure out how it’s all going to work out when I’m only obsessively looking at 5 pieces of a 5,000 piece endeavor. It is not about a decision. It is just about loving Him. And that is it. You do that first and foremost and the pieces will come together just as they were intended to, just as He designed you to fit together. And don’t just love Him with some pieces of your life. You might produce a semi-completed, lopsided picture that way. But if you want Him to receive the full blown glory in your life, you’re going to have to include all the pieces. Spill out all the contents of your box of potential and set out to love Him with your whole life, every single part of it. Surrender the pieces you don’t like, those ones you do, the ones you want to keep for yourself in the box, and the ones you're sitting on.

My tendency is to get frustrated. I can’t see how it’s all going to work out. I can’t figure out what should go where or what the picture is even supposed to look like. I don’t understand why He wants to shift certain portions to different locations. I get impatient when searching for fits and try and manipulate angles and lie to myself and say “It works. It’s fine.” And many times I forget completely what I’m even trying to accomplish. And that’s when I need to refer to my reference: the photo on the cover of the box – the Image I’m trying to display. That is what it is about. Keeping our eyes on Him. All the time. Not just in context of this year or the current season of life we find ourselves in, but all the time, every day. Drawing from the real picture, the eternal purpose we will start to realize that the awkwardness, the toil, the mess of our puzzle is beginning to come together into something beautiful.

Forgive my ramble. I’m not sure what came over me. What I started off meaning to say is not at all what I’ve said. But if you’ve bothered to bear with me and read through the whole thing, I hope you will join me in spilling out the contents of your own puzzle onto the floor and dive into loving Him with all your pieces. The odd shaped ones, the corners, the dark colored ones that will seem pointless, the ones that seem to belong to a different puzzle, and the ones bright with color and shape. Let’s not get hung up on what we understand or don’t understand. And let’s just love Him with all we’ve got.

We’ve heard that all before. But it’s still true.

Three months ago my life took an unexpected turn. “But that piece can’t possibly go there! We were suppose to work on this section of the puzzle first!” I had exclaimed. But little did I know that when I decided to finally give up my agenda and give into the pursuit of Him, pieces fit together more beautifully than I ever could have imagined. I don’t understand their beauty yet but as He is revealed in my life each day, I am made a little more whole.

I do apologize. This post is unoriginal, raw, random, and reminiscent of that person who hogs all the sharing time at ch.rch gatherings with emotional cliches and painful to bear sappy analogies. But this is a blog after all! ;-)