Some Pieces Don’t Fit

Imagine your life being like a giant jigsaw puzzle. At first the pieces seem to fall into place rather easily because there are several people helping you. As you get older the task becomes a little more difficult as you are making more decisions on your own. You learn quickly that a lot of the pieces you place are chosen through trial and error. Frustration mounts as you find a piece that you know will work, but it doesn’t fit at all. So you begin searching for the right one. Those pieces involving school, vocations, love, marriage, children, finances and many other life decisions can be hard to fit where they belong.

When we begin to reach adulthood our vision of what our puzzle will look like is one of a beautiful screen like a majestic mountain, a lovely seascape, or perhaps that breathtaking sunrise peaking through the early morning clouds. However, as those needed pieces to our puzzle are buried in a heap of other pieces, and we try to squeeze the wrong piece into our puzzle we find that what we first envisioned becomes distorted looking nothing at all like the picture we had hoped to create. The more this happens the more disappointed we become. Depression sets in, life is hard, and many don’t want to work on that puzzle anymore. The frustration level becomes so great you want to simply destroy all the work with one sweep of the arm tossing the whole thing onto the floor.

There are probably pieces to most everyone’s life puzzle that have left ugly blemishes on what has been created. Bad pieces have been mixed in that should never have been used. They were wedged in because we didn’t want to take time to look for the correct piece. We became impatient and chose the easy piece even though it didn’t fit properly. Or maybe we fell in love with a piece that should never been used. Or perhaps we got tired of the correct piece, removed it and replaced it with one that seemed more attractive. That can be true of a marriage, a job, or some materialistic thing we just had to have. Some of the wrong pieces may have been innocent mistakes, while many of them are simply a result of sin.

What if, at this very moment, as you are looking at your life puzzle you are repulsed at what you see. You don’t like the scene in front of you. Can anything be done to make it look better? Who can deal with those mistake pieces, and those sin pieces? The One who overcame sin. The One who died to take away our sin. The One who makes all things new. Jesus is the one who can make our life puzzle a glorious piece of art. It can become more than just a gigsaw puzzle if we completely turn it over to him to restore it to what God intended it to be in the first place. Give your life to Jesus and let him finish what you started.