Oddly shaped, but perfectly purposed
There’s something strangely satisfying and therapeutic about puzzles.
But interestingly enough, the most exciting part about puzzles actually often isn’t so much completing them. Instead, the real “aha!” moments of victory are when you try putting together seemingly arbitrarily shaped pieces and see that fit together perfectly. Cue tiny inner celebration.
Upon first meeting someone, you can barely get to know much about them. You can learn a little bit about their job, their dog, their taste in cuisines, and perhaps make educated guesses about them, but after all that, it’s barely a scratch on the surface.
But as time goes by and you gradually gather more pieces, the initially oddball bits and pieces of their “picture” begin to fit together.
From hearing stories from their life, you uncover how many of those were vital landmarks along their journey, necessary puzzle pieces completing their present picture of who they are, even when they hadn’t realized it at the time.
As continuous puzzles, and we are ceaselessly discovering each other’s inward intricacies – even those in ourselves. And in reality, human capacities could actually never allow us to truly, fully know every bit of each other’s puzzles.
The thing is: that’s okay. In fact, that’s even better, because that makes our interactions and relationships with one another a never-ending adventure.
It was never so much about completing the puzzle. Because after that’s done, it’s over. The real adventures lies in the discovery of the pieces and how they go together.
People are not only puzzles, but we ourselves are puzzle pieces.
When we focus solely at ourselves disconnected from a bigger picture, we can easily feel out of place, lost, and without purpose.
But instead, when we look outwards towards others and the world around us, we can start to realize that we have a much more important part to play.
Each of us is a puzzle piece with specific gifts, traits, strengths, and stories that may seem seemingly odd, random, or useless in isolation. After all, how significant could one single, small cardboard be?
But when combined with the right pieces, it turns out that all of us are essential pieces designed to help bring about wholeness to the fragmentation we see around us – in our families, our friends, our workplaces, our cities, our nations.
Every person, uniquely shaped and patterned, has a spot in the big picture, reserved for only them to fill. If the puzzle is missing even just one piece, the picture is incomplete.
Sometimes, we might feel like edge pieces. Overlooked, underappreciated, unseen, even unnecessary. Neglected, pushed aside, put on the fringe. Not flashy enough to be in the center. Just another boring piece of the background.
But ironically, edge pieces are oftentimes the most important pieces. They are the ones needed for the framework and foundation of the puzzle. They are actually the ones on which the whole rest of the puzzle depends.
Sometimes, you might get tired of waiting to find the other pieces meant to fit you – whether it’s with relationships, friendships, other communities, majors, jobs, careers, living situations, etc. You start doubting whether those other pieces even exist.
So you cheat, forcefully fit one piece with another one (”ah well, close enough”), knowing inside that they don’t actually work and belong together, especially given that the shapes may fit, but the colors and patterns clearly don’t.
The problem with force-fitting two pieces that weren’t meant to be together is that it throws the whole puzzle off. The piece that is supposed to go there can’t anymore, because its spot is being taken by an imposter piece. And the imposter piece, the one that’s forcefully fit in, can’t fulfill its true, intended placement in the puzzle because it’s occupying someone else’s.
When this happens, the puzzle is not as it was intended to be. Sadly, its full potential is cut short. There will always be the awkward gaps and mismatched designs, reminding you where your impatience got the best of you.
When we give into impatience, fall into laziness, or lose sight of our worth and end up falsifying the completion of the picture, we end up robbing both the world of the pieces they desperately need, and ourselves from the puzzle(s) we were meant to fulfill.
Working on puzzles by yourself can be nice and often even meditative, but when the puzzle is a huge one with hundreds or thousands of pieces, it’s often much more fun and way easier to do with others than just relying on yourself.
We can ask for help when we can’t find a piece ourselves, because someone else might just spot just the one we were looking for. We can divide and conquer, putting our focus on separate areas of the puzzle and then putting them together like pangeas.
The load is lightened. Conversations ensue. Everyone’s energies, victory moments, encouragement, and advice feed off of each other and spur each other on, turning an originally arduous process into an enjoyable team project.
If each of us is a puzzle and are in puzzles ourselves (with definitely more than a thousand pieces), how much more fun, productive, and eye-opening would it be to do it with others?
Life is so much better when done with others.
So, what does this all mean for us?
Each little quirk, layer, story, and aspect of ourselves is a piece of the puzzle that makes up who we are. On top of that, each of us individually is also a piece of the puzzle that makes up God’s much bigger story, a picture that’s more beautiful and wonderful than we could even imagine ourselves.
Let’s think of ourselves not as unnecessary edge pieces, but pieces that are each equally essential to healing the world.
Let’s focus on ourselves not in isolation, and in relation to others around us and the roles we may be called to play in other people’s lives.
Let’s remember how God has been crazily faithful to us in the pieces of our story already, making all the random pieces somehow make sense in retrospect, and how he’s promised to continue providing us exactly the right remaining pieces, at exactly the right time.
The more time and energy we invest in finding out how our own pieces fit, grace we extend to others to better understand their pieces, and importance we place on each of our roles in the bigger picture that is the entire course of human history (#nbd), the more we’ll be able to revel in the magic that happens when the pieces begin fitting together into the beautiful, grand, and glorious overarching plan each of us were created to be a part of.
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” - Ephesians 2:10
