LIFE IS A PEICE
OF A LARGER PUZZLE: PUZZLED?
Life,
you'll notice, is a piece of a puzzle.
Life
doesn't come to us like a math problem. It comes to us the way that a piece of
a puzzle does, piece by piece. You wake up. What will happen next? You don't
get to know-you have to enter in, take the journey as it comes. The sun might
be shining. There might be a tornado outside. Your friends might call and
invite you to go sailing. You might lose your job.
Life
unfolds like the coming together of a puzzle. Each day has a beginning and an
end. There are all sorts of characters, all sorts of settings. A year goes by
like a chapter from a novel. Sometimes it seems like a tragedy. Sometimes like
a comedy. Most of it feels like a soap opera. Whatever happens, it's a peice of
a puzzle through and through.
We
can discover the piece of a puzzle. Maybe not with perfect clarity, maybe not
in the detail that you would like, but in greater clarity than most of us now
have, and that would be worth the price of the whole puzzle.
Every
piece of a puzzle, great and small, shares the same essential structure
because every piece of a puzzle we tell borrows its power from a Larger Puzzle.
There is a piece of a puzzle that we just can't seem to escape. There is a piece
of a puzzle put on the human heart.
As
Ecclesiastes has it, ”He has planted eternity in the human heart.” (3:11)
Wouldn't
it make sense that if we ever did find the secret to our lives, the secret to
the universe, it would come to us first as the unfolding of a puzzle? Piece of
a puzzle is the very nature of reality. Like the missing parts of a novel, it
would explain these pages we are holding, the chapters of our lives.
