Puzzle pieces

Several years during Christmas holidays, my parents set up a card table and chairs in their den, and all our gathered family members worked a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. That is, we worked toward completing the puzzle.

I can still picture my maternal granddaddy hunched over that table, puzzle piece in hand, searching, trying, and searching some more. The TV might blare, the conversation sparkle – or the room stand otherwise empty and silent – but Granddaddy had a mission: place the next piece.

The rest of us contributed, too. Working together or individually, pondering for hours or pausing at the table to say, “That piece goes there,” we inched toward the goal.

Rarely did we complete the puzzle during the holidays. At the allotted times, we returned to our respective homes, leaving Mama and Daddy to mull the mystery into the early days of the new year. Later, popping in for a visit, we’d find the last piece fitted into place.

One thing enabled our family to finish each puzzle in anything short of a lifetime: the box with picture on it. Studying that picture and comparing it to the confusing pile of miscellany in front of us, we eventually conquered the chaos.

Short of completing the puzzle, the most satisfying moments happened when a large section came together almost at once. One piece opened the way to place a whole series of pieces, and a key element of the previously hidden picture became clear. Whether a hedgerow or patch of sky, person or animal, structure or flower, random shapes with capricious colors suddenly fell together into a recognizable pattern. What we could not previously distinguish now made sense.

We haven’t worked a family jigsaw in years, but I’ve recently sensed that a section of puzzle pieces is falling into place – not only in my life, but also in the world. I could be wrong here, so I’m scrambling to check what’s before me with the picture on the box.

Some scoff at the notion of a “picture.” Life is a jumble of pieces, they say, but these pieces form no pattern. Chance created them. Force the puzzling together any way you choose, they urge, because your puzzle means only what you read into it. For sure, don’t expect your puzzle to fit into any sort of larger one.

Others take a different tack. Quite certain they know where each piece fits, they boldly forecast what will go where, and scoff at anyone still puzzling over the puzzle.

Isaiah 46:9-10 quotes one who proclaims himself the ultimate expert here: “I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning …. I say: My purpose will stand.”

Aha. This God insists that He prepared all the puzzle pieces so they will fit together to accomplish what he intends. The same God claims to “make known the end from the beginning.”

Yet, paradoxically, Isaiah 48:6-7 reports this God as saying to his people, “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. . . you have not heard of them before today. So you cannot say, 'Yes, I knew of them.'”

Understanding what the world is coming to and where my life fits into it requires that I neither dismiss the box – er, Bible – nor arrogantly assume I can see it all clearly. Knowing that God reveals what he will, when and to whom he chooses, I study the picture, ponder the bewildering and listen when he whispers, “That piece goes there.”

© 2002, 2007 Deborah P. Brunt. All rights reserved.