Your Life Is a Piece of the Puzzle
My (Ricks) mother loves to do puzzles. I know I didnt inherit that gene; sitting for hours and agonizing over a small piece of cardboard is not my idea of a good time. Our dining room was home to a puzzle in progress nearly the whole time I was growing up. Occasionally my sister or I sneaked one or two of the puzzle pieces from the table. It was fun to watch Mom go mad when the whole picture was nearly finished and she was missing one or two pieces. The picture was incomplete, and the work wasnt finished. Even though you could tell what the picture was, it was less than satisfying to have a missing piece.
The puzzles Mom had already worked were stored in an upstairs closet between my bedroom and my sisters bedroom until Mom could give them away or sell them at a garage sale. There could be as many as twenty-five puzzles in that closet at one time. One day a friend and I decided that those puzzle pieces would make a great slide. We took twenty to thirty thousand puzzle pieces and filled the hallway floor with them. Then we took turns diving across them. It was a great time until it dawned on me that there was no way to get those puzzle pieces back into the right boxes. Of course, who said they had to go back into the right boxes? (I wonder how many of those garage sale shoppers are still trying today to put those puzzles together.)
Sometimes your life may look like an insignificant cardboard piecenot even a border piece or one with an obvious place to fit into. You might even think some of the puzzle pieces in your box belong in other boxes! You wonder what good this life isnot much value, not much significance, nearly useless. But this is Gods picture, his puzzle. He knows what hes doing. If the Bible is right, then God indicates that your part of the puzzle is needed, valued, and planned for.
So who are you? What is your life? That all depends. You can simply collect all that has been tossed into your being. You can be defined by your successes and failures or limited by the unfortunate things that have happened to you. Or you can be a person who sees your life as on loan from God, to be used, enjoyed, and lived in such a way that Gods story is being written through your storyand your story is impacting the stories of others.
Excerpted from Living a Life on Loan, Finding Grace at the Intersections
Standard Publishing
September 2006
written by Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson
For more information please contact:
Diane Morrow dmorrow@tbbmedia.com 800.927.1517.
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