life - our jigsaw puzzle

06 March 2017: Morning

EVERYWHERE I GO:

Romans 8:28 NASB

[28] And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

THE BIG PICTURE

Romans 8:28 may be the most often quoted and misunderstood verse in all of the New Testament. It must be taken as a whole, not in pieces, for its truth to be rightly applied.

For many Christmases, my wife bought one of those 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles as a family holiday project. We would get out a little card table, dump the box out, and get to the task of putting that puzzle together. I don't know if any of our boys particularly liked jigsaw puzzles, but we managed to make it into a sort of competition somehow, and they did like that.

When you're working a puzzle that size, it helps to find the corners, then fill in the outer edge, then the interior. I can't tell you the number of times one of us said, "There has to be a piece missing. I've touched every piece on this table, and not one of them fits this space."

A lot of us view life like a jigsaw puzzle. It's as if God has handed us the pieces and we struggle to make them fit. But God does not see it that way. In this puzzle we call life, He sees the whole even as we fumble with the pieces, and He causes it all to work together for our good and His glory for those who love Him, and are called according to His purpose.

my thoughts:

looking at life from a jigsaw puzzle:

it helps to find the corners:

locating a corner makes it easier to see the shape of the piece needed.

Christ is the cornerstone needed to begin putting our life together.

then fill in the outer edge:

as each outer edge is put in place, glimpses of what it is inside can be seen.

after Christ is established as the cornerstone, our outer edging which includes friends and activities r cleaned up and made straiter.

then the interior:

with the corners and edges in place, the more difficult task of putting the interior of the puzzle together begins in earnest.

now that Christ is firmly established as the cornerstone and our outward life is reflecting that, our more hidden interior is now being worked on. each piece that once was hidden in the mass of puzzle pieces can now be seen but not yet fit into the puzzle. this is where we find out that God works all things. He it is that configures our life to fit perfectly in the mix of all the other pieces.

there is no other that can fit ur puzzle perfectly together and have it display properly.

each of us must come to a point in life that we surrender all that is holding us back. when we do, the puzzle is no longer a mass of unfittable pieces but a beautiful work of art that cannot be duplicated