Hello!
My family, like many others, love a good jigsaw puzzle. We’ll set up a puzzle on the lounge table and pore over it for hours. If it’s a big one, when the initial rush of puzzling energy disappears, we’ll get distracted by something else, but whenever anyone passes through the lounge, they’ll stop to put a piece or two in. Slowly but surely the puzzle is built until eventually, the last piece slips in, and my mom finally gets her coffee table back.
I’m sure every puzzle building family has that one puzzle that trumps all other puzzles. The puzzle that takes weeks or even months to complete and becomes a legend in the house. In my house, there are two such puzzles. The first is the Smartie puzzle. 1000 pieces of mismatched red, green, blue and yellow. With no easy way to sort this puzzle, it was started many times, given up on many times, rolled up in felt for two years and then finally solved.
But the Smartie puzzle was nothing compared to our Everest of puzzles, simply dubbed “The Dolphin puzzle”. Whenever we discuss a puzzle’s difficulty, it will be compared with The Dolphin puzzle. Although we have tried many times, we have never completed this puzzle. Almost a month ago, I decided to try again, and I unleashed The Dolphin puzzle on the lounge table.
The photo above is a photo of this puzzle. It seems easy enough with its many shades of blue and distinctive dolphins, but don’t be fooled. Whoever designed this puzzle had treachery in their hearts…
The difficulty starts with the border. A simple process of separating the border pieces and building a nice frame, which normally takes an hour, took six hours! The solid black gives you no guidance of which way round the pieces go and the fading colours make one grey piece look very out of place even when it fits perfectly into the neighbouring black pieces! The fading is so bad that it was only after an hour of staring at the box that we noticed the second dolphin.
Thrown into this faded mess, there is the complexity of pieces that don’t even look like puzzle pieces. There are curveball pieces with a random smooth edge or a jagged line edge, instead of a hole edge or sticky-in-the-hole edge. Even when you find the piece that matched that strange edge, they won’t stay together so you’ll often have to re-find that matching piece.
The true evil genius of the puzzle designers is yet to be revealed though. You’ve all heard the analogy of “we’re all pieces of a puzzle and eventually we will find our perfect place in it”. That “every piece has it’s one place that another piece can’t fill”. Maybe you even thought that’s where I was going with this Newsletter. Alas no. The true evil genius in this puzzle is that one piece can fit into many different places. One piece would fit perfectly into all the surrounding pieces. It would be 100% right if it weren’t for the fact that there is now one bright blue puzzle piece in the middle of the dolphin. Or a piece of black shadow in the middle of the clear blue water.
Every piece placed is doubted. It was a running joke in the family that when my gran built puzzles, when she went to bed, we had to take out all the pieces she had misplaced. Now the joke’s on us. With every second piece that gets placed, it ends up being just marginally wrong.
This two steps forward, one step back, has been incredibly frustrating, but we keep going. Every piece placed is still progress. And most of that progress came when my pride gave in, and I started to use the box to get an idea of what shapes to look for. Progress came when I stepped back and saw the bigger picture.
A puzzle is a simple thing to step away from and view from a different angle. There are very tangible pieces that we can rotate until everything finally falls into place. Life’s puzzles are not so simple. Taking a step back from a situation or challenge can be difficult or just a pain.
We can have our own uncertainty of if we’re putting pieces in the right place, making the right decision. We can be faced with complex curveball pieces that do not meet our expectations of what a piece should look like. Pieces that make it difficult to keep the puzzle together. Situations that we did not anticipate and challenge us to keep our lives together.
And unlike that puzzle box, in our lives we cannot step back and see the bigger picture. Instead, we must step back and trust the One who can. Our King knows where each piece will go, even the curveballs, because not only can He see the box, but He also designed the puzzle. When life becomes too puzzling, take that step back and take your eyes off the challenge. Focus instead on the One who is ready to guide you through.
“The Lord will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.”
Psalm 121: 7-8
Much love in Christ
Heather P