One of my favorite pastimes/hobbies was doing 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles. Many, many hours have been spent bent over a table building puzzles. Cold, winter weather was only good in my mind for killing insects and staying inside to build puzzles. I’ve slowed down in recent years because I have to admit to being a “puzzle snob” i.e. there are only certain ones I would do (Titanic & trains mostly), plus I didn’t want to spend the money on the ever-increasing price of having leisure. However, I was given a panoramic puzzle of PNC Park (Pirates baseball field) which I did, glued and gave away to a sports memorabilia collector, and one of the Pittsburgh skyline. I finally decided to do the skyline starting last Thursday.
I’ve been watching it come together. Sorting pieces throughout the “edge-finding” stage, has me sort of guessing pieces that go together. I then bunch them in a certain pile to be sorted later. Often, I find out I was wrong and they actually belonged somewhere else. This puzzle is s-l-o-w-l-y coming together, piece by piece (makes sense right?). Often I will have little side projects going on as “like pieces” are found. Eventually, I get to incorporate them into the greater puzzle. Sometimes it is literally a slog through seemingly endless tries. And then sometimes it is like voila! One piece pulls in another and another until multiple pieces later a bigger picture emerges.
One of my favorite groups is a Christian power metal group called Theocracy (I know that is probably not most of my readers cup of tea). Their most recent recording includes a song called Mosaic. The song, as you can probably surmise by the title, is a take on broken pieces made into a beautiful piece of glass. Out of the ugliness of broken glass the artisan can make something beautiful. A snippet of lyrics says, “‘Cause after all, the pieces fall landing where they may/You never left or chose to throw it all away/An unknown future, broken past/Like imperfect panes of glass/Revealing a larger grand design.” (Lyrics by Matt Smith-2023)
Life is a mosaic, very often made up of broken pieces of glass. No one’s life is perfect; we are made of broken pieces of glass. But we have an Artisan, a Creator, a Master Craftsman, who loves us, never leaves us, and puts us all back together. Sin breaks us; He rebuilds us. He will take broken, disjointed fragments and put them back together in the right place, making sense of it all. He makes a beautiful mosaic out of broken, shattered lives.
He’s done if for me. He’s done it for people I know. Let Him do it for you.
