Winter holidays are the time for pulling out a puzzle. So I did just that this week. I debated over which of two puzzles to select – both classified as ‘religious’ – and ended up going with ‘My Grace is Sufficient’ atop a nature background.

Before too long I decided I should have gone with ‘The Lord is my Strength and Defense’. It has more colour differentiation.

I appeared to have picked the harder puzzle.

At any rate, I set out with a strategy, getting most of the border in first, so I had the big picture. Then I got to filling in the rest of the details on the inside.

These days I find putting puzzles together quite satisfying. Yet I didn’t gravitate towards them as a child. Often when my brothers were working on a puzzle together I’d leave them to it and find something else to do instead.

However, I can recall one day when, for whatever reason, I came and joined them as they were getting towards the end of a puzzle. I added a few pieces in and… then held one in my hand thus ensuring I would put the last piece into the puzzle.

This probably irritated them, but it does serve to make a point.

No puzzle is complete until the final piece is firstly found, and then, put into place. Even if you’ve got all the other pieces in place, if you’re missing a couple or even just one piece, the puzzle is not yet done.

You need all the pieces to crack the puzzle.

I think that’s like life. Making decisions is made more difficult when there is missing information. Half ideas and half formed thoughts are not really valuable thoughts at all.

Yet, I think there’s another way puzzles are like life.

Much like when putting a puzzle together, there are times when life is slow plodding and you’re barely getting a piece in place. Then you put one piece in and there’s a sudden flurry of others that you had sitting around that start to flow into place.

One thing happens that leads to a whole range of other events.

It’s like a domino effect.

The more rapid series of events doesn’t deny the plod that existed beforehand though. And so it’s good to remember that during the slower or quieter times in life.

Just because we don’t see anything, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing happening. We just need to persevere.

As it says in the Bible:

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. 

Good advice. And worth meditating on.

Perhaps to do so, I should get a puzzle with that verse atop a nature background as well. One with even more colour differentiation.

That’d allow me the satisfaction of putting the final piece in before too long.

Yours with a missing piece,

Alison