But where are the instructions?

 

 

Sometimes our personal situations appear like a 1000-piece puzzle of unrelated, broken, and odd-shaped parts.  It is hard to make sense of it.

We talk about details just falling together.  But the pieces don't just come together.  They were designed to fit that way.

Yesterday as we pulled out a puzzle to put together before supper, one of our five-year-old grandsons took a look at the pile of pieces and then looked back in the box.

"But where are the instructions?" he asked.

I chuckled.  Just take one piece, buddy, and start to connect with another.

I feel like sometimes we are waiting for printed-out instructions, and God says, "Take the nearest piece and see how it connects."

Our circumstances are not broken parts but puzzle pieces that actually fit together.  We just can't see the connections yet, nor the whole picture. 

And sometimes a really odd piece in our lives --that we question why it belongs at all-- shows up later as a vital link in an unexpected place.  God redeems even the oddest ones.

Take one piece and then the next one comes to the surface.  Turn it this way.  Turn it around.  And pick up another.  A puzzle in itself helps us to think and see differently.  Our little buddy sat looking at five or six pieces in front of him.  He reached for another that looked similar.  And suddenly, he screeched, "Grams! Grams! It fits!!!"  Not just one to another, but now a whole row of them.

Surprise!  It does connect after all.

 

But not all at once, lest anyone should boast.

"The thing that really testifies for God and for the people of God in the long run is steady perseverance, even when the work cannot be seen by others,"  says Oswald Chambers in his epic My Utmost for His Highest.

Our witness takes shape in faithfully navigating the ordinary and the really hard parts and how we respond differently.

We need not to always be concerned about where we fit in all of this, looking for a deeper meaning, or for that significant piece that has our face or name on it. Our essential part may be just making connections in a vastly bigger narrative. 

Sometimes the least noticeable, the most ordinary, the completely overlooked, is the key piece that pulls the picture together.  Sometimes we need to stand on the other side of the table to see things differently.  Sometimes the link that we are looking for just fell on the floor under the table, and we have not bothered to look for it.  Sometimes a piece is missing altogether, but overall it really doesn't matter.

And maybe the main point of this exercise, struggle, or dilemma is just the camaraderie of working side by side, the conversation, and encouragement of being together.  We can all use heaps of that kind of fellowship.

Where are the instructions?  Does God always have to print out the step-by-step directions?  Obedience is just following Him into His faithfulness, not even knowing where the next piece belongs. What doesn't fit together now may be not yet, just waiting to fit perfectly later.

As Kevin DeYoung advises in the title of one of his books:  "Just Do Something."

Pick up the next piece.  And watch what God does with it.

 

And He is before all things,

and in Him

    all things hold together.

         Colossians 1. 17