Even as a toddler, my grandniece, Arianna, was quite adept at putting together puzzles. As she has gotten older, she still enjoys fitting the brightly colored pieces together, but she has also found that some puzzles have a lot more pieces and making sense of them can frustrate her desire to see a completed picture. That’s when I hear, “Grandma, can you help me?!?” And that’s when all the jumbled pieces are suddenly in my possession. The heap beside me makes no sense to her – they are just broken pieces of a hoped-for reality. How often do our lives seem like a heap of broken pieces, the reality we had hoped for, distorted or obliterated? You may have a broken past because of your own sin or the sins of others, or because of the tragedies of life. You may be watching the present crumble around you, or your hopes and dreams for the future are being destroyed. God wants all the broken pieces given to Him – openly, honestly, and with nothing held back. Given – so that He can provide. Given – so you can know the warmth of His love and care. Given – so that nothing stands in the way of your relationship with Him.
Did you notice that before Arianna gave me her broken pieces, she had arrived at a place of personal brokenness? She had realized, “I can’t do this.” As long as we think we can work life out on our own, we probably won’t go to God. We will stay in our frustration, our failures, and our disappointments, feeling that life offers nothing else. God wants to put the pieces together for us. He says, “I know the plans I have for you ... They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” And Paul told the Romans, “We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” But He doesn’t want us holding on to the pieces! He wants us to give them to Him.
Sometimes though we still don’t “see” what God is doing and we wonder if we “did it right” or doubt begins to play games with our thinking. Sometimes when I put the pieces together for Arianna, we are sitting on the floor or at a table, and she is sitting across from me. As the puzzle begins to shape and form for me, her perspective is totally different! The picture still doesn’t make sense! Ephesians 2:10 tells us that we are individually a masterpiece created by God. Literally, that means we are each a poem, written as an expression of God Himself to reveal Him to others. The broken pieces of our lives can and will come together as a beautiful picture of Him, if we give Him all of the pieces.
(Related Bible reading: Jeremiah 29:11; Romans 8:28; Ephesians 2:10)
