24
Not long ago, our family took a vacation with friends,
and someone brought along a puzzle, spilling its pieces
out onto a table in the corner of the living room. I
found myself noticing how, over the course of the
week, people approached the puzzle differently. Some
would walk up and quickly find a piece or two before
moving on to whatever they were doing next, while
others spent hours of focused time putting it together.
Puzzles have a way of bringing us together, of
checking off boxes for different kinds of people: There
are hunters, who love to scour and dig and look for the
hard-to-find pieces; there are competitors, who always
seem to be racing against some imaginary clock; there
are strategists, who spend much of their time sorting
pieces into piles by color; there are achievers, who are
discontent until every piece has found its rightful spot.
And then there are the leisurely folks, the ones who
are just happy to play a part, content to sit and talk for
hours while unhurriedly perusing the pieces. Though
every person’s process varies, the end goal is the same:
to take a bunch of seemingly random pieces and fit
them together until the picture of what you’re building
comes into focus.
Since that vacation, I’ve been excited about adding a
few puzzles to our file of things we can do together as
a family. Every time we build a new puzzle, I become
more and more intrigued by how much it resembles life
and our journeys toward wholeness. Like a puzzle, our
lives are made up of a bunch of pieces that fit together
to make us who we are. And, in the same way, there
are a number of emotions you might feel when you
open it and pour out its pieces: excited, overwhelmed,
hopeful. But, piece by piece, we get to work. We go at
our own pace and by our own strategy. We sift through
the pile of pieces, pursuing the whole picture of who
we were made to be.
PIECE
PIECE
story by JOANNA GAINES
