As I've been down sick this week, I've been spending some time doing puzzles and was struck at how much my health journey has been like a puzzle. When I began my journey in June 2020, it was like purchasing a brand new puzzle. The picture on the cover of the fully completed puzzle inspired me to slowly assemble each piece into a replica of that beautiful picture. Each pound I lost was like one more piece in the puzzle--small victories that added up to one satisfying completed work in the fall of 2021 when I reached my health goal.
And then my focus shifted, and my determination waned and somehow pieces of that beautiful puzzle began to fall away. I got lazy about staying hydrated, began making less than healthy food choices, and let busy days crowd out healthy movement. All of which ultimately began to change my health puzzle into something completely different. It was like taking pieces from a totally different puzzle and trying to cram them into the original puzzle. And the only result was something that bore no resemblance to the image I had worked so hard to complete.
I haven't taken the whole puzzle apart. Of the 105 pounds I lost, I have maintained a 75-pound loss--about a 70% success rate. No one would look at a puzzle that was 70% complete and call it done. And so I must return to the puzzle table and slowly begin to reassemble those remaining pieces.
Is it frustrating? Absolutely! Humbling, embarrassing, and shame-inducing. On a recent puzzle assembly, I was happily sorting pieces when I managed to upend the box of pieces and had to get down on my hands and knees and look for each stray piece. While disheartening, it did not deter me from returning to the work. So too, in my health, while it may feel like I've just scattered half the puzzle, I need to keep focused on the goal that leads to so many benefits: better sleep, more fluid joints, and increased mental clarity.
In puzzling, there is the satisfaction of putting in that final piece, surveying the completed image, and maybe taking a picture to remember it. Then it's back in the box with the pieces to wait for another day to assemble again.
Puzzles, like life, are usually not one and done. If I invest time and space to store a puzzle, it must be worth doing more than once. And how many lessons in life must we do over and over and over? For me, health is one puzzle that I know I will have to keep working on. I know I have to commit daily to once again getting each piece back into place.
Whether it's health, or some other battle for you, we will always have puzzles in progress. I hope that my struggles will make me more compassionate toward others' puzzle journeys. Those "a-ha" moments of putting in that final piece are few and far between. And when they do arrive, we cannot really live there. Life goes on, and it's on to another puzzle or challenge. At work, as a parent, it seems as though as soon as one puzzle is "completed" another presents itself and we are in constant puzzling mode--wading through pieces that don't always fall nicely into place and we often have multiple puzzles ongoing at once.
Being a frugal person, I often take a gamble and buy used puzzles. When I was buying 24-piece puzzles for young children, I would first count to make sure all the pieces were there. But when we moved into the 200+ piece puzzles, I had to take chances, figuring that a few missing pieces were still worth the experience even if every last piece wasn't there. Here's one of those that had a few missing (that's my blue card table showing through in the circle; another space you cannot see, was missing from the border):
And other times I luck out, like this recent acquisition:
This was the puzzle I recently scattered all over the floor. Without knowing if the pieces had all been there to begin with, I figured I'd never know if I just didn't find all the pieces on the floor. As I was nearing the end of the puzzle, I happened to look down and there were two pieces (honestly not all that hidden), that I'm not sure how I missed in the first place. And I was totally shocked when all the pieces were actually present.
Yes, I was happy to have found a puzzle with all its pieces. But in spite of appearances, what you cannot see, are the number of ripped pieces. The previous owner apparently chose to use puzzle glue on only the edge pieces and didn't use particular care in deconstructing the puzzle. Not sure if they gave up (and therefore did not glue the whole thing) or if perhaps they just lost interest in the puzzle. If they gave up in frustration, it may be because part of that lower navy blue section was assembled (and glued) incorrectly. I sweated through every rearrangement of adjacent pieces that I could possible try until I realized that the border itself had been assembled wrong. So I had to carefully pry apart those glued pieces and when I found the correct order, all the other pieces fell into place.
How often have we seen a "pretty" picture of someone's life online, at church, in brief glimpses when we see them at school or work and we assume the perfection of the image? When in reality there are broken and ripped parts of their life that you cannot see.
And with regard to the glued pieces of the Doctor Who puzzle, that made me think how easily we may construct a "framework" for our life, assuming that we have assembled it correctly. Perhaps we have based our worth on our accomplishments, our intelligence, or outward appearance. And all the pieces of life seem to fall into place for us...until they don't. How many times have we given up on the puzzle (or marriage, or job, or child) instead of questioning our faulty framework or faulty premise on which our life has been built?
In a normal puzzle, there is only one correct way to assemble. When God created our life, he intended for the outer frame, the boundary of our life to be assembled with Him as the outline of our life. We may be able to cram pieces together in a different way, try to rearrange the pieces to fit our whim, but the pieces of our life will never fully connect in the way the puzzle Creator intended.
Have you been trying to put together a puzzle blindly? Doing so in the dark, without the guiding influence of God creating a border and shaping boundary for the pieces of your life? Have you tossed away the box in which the puzzle came? Refusing to allow the perfect completed image to be your guide? Or have you perhaps just started working on random middle parts of your puzzle, hoping that when you come to the edge of your life, everything will just "work out?"
Jesus is the perfect image of what our life should be trying to replicate. The image we should be striving toward as we assemble the puzzle of our life. We are to become like Him--an image that will be complete when we are united with our Savior after death. When the puzzle of this life will become reality. When we will finally see how all the pieces of our life were really being assembled by a Master Puzzler for our good and His glory. Pieces that will one day fit so perfectly into place that we will no longer see the lines between them but only the one glorious reflection of Jesus' beauty shining out from us.
I have upended my puzzle pieces many times in life and I expect to do so many more times before I die. Thankfully, the Lord helps me with infinite patience, mercy and forgiveness to keep working on the puzzle He has mapped out for my life. My puzzle may not look like yours--we all have our own unique challenges and triumphs hidden within the days of our life. But we have confidence in knowing when we see him face to face, that within the Master Puzzler's hands, there will be no missing pieces, no torn edges, and no distorted images. Only beauty and completeness.
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