I love puzzles, and not just the mysteries-treasure hunt-seeking for answers type. I like the jigsaw kind too. A few years ago, I started putting one out during Thanksgiving day and while dinner cooks, various members of the family will sit down and work on it here and there. My oldest daughter is the soldier though, she views them as some kind of personal challenge and like those monks that can slow down their bodily functions to near death for months on end, she will sit for days almost without food and drink until it is finished.

This same daughter (D) dated a young man in high school that became part of the family and he LOATHES puzzles. He would show up and see what she was doing and turn his big, brown puppy dog eyes on me as if to ask “WHY??????” Reluctantly he would join her and once he stuck it out until the wee hours of the night just to finish one so she would leave the house on a “real date” the following night. As an act of revenge, when he left on his mission to Peru, one of his last gifts to her was a box which proudly bears the label “Worlds Most Difficult Puzzle”.

In case the link doesn’t work, let me explain why this puzzle is so challenging by quoting the website:“This 529-piece puzzle is double-sided, depicting the same artwork on both sides rotated 90° with respect to each other. Buffalo Games then die cuts the puzzle once from each side so the top and bottom are identical! puzzle: 529 pieces, 15 x 15 inches.”

Now, what that doesn’t tell you is that the image is a collage of black and white spotted Dalmatians, and the pieces are all exactly the same size AND shape-completely identical and thus interchangeable. Because the backside of each piece is not blank, and they are cut twice (which means there is no “flat side” vs “beveled side” to distinguish up from down-top from bottom) until the entire puzzle is assembled and then flipped over, you can not be sure you’ve put it together correctly! My friends, it is insanity in a box!

I was thinking about puzzles today in reference to life as we know it. We gather pieces of truth or knowledge throughout our lives and begin to piece together an understanding of why we are here, where we are going, and what it is all supposed to mean. For some people, the pieces seem to fit together neatly and the image seems to emerge in an orderly and pleasing fashion, and for others, the pieces don’t seem to fit anywhere or it seems impossible to determine what it is supposed to look like when it’s finished. Most of us probably fall somewhere in the middle, but I think most of us wonder if we’ll even be given all of the pieces to complete it and perhaps like my daughter’s friend, sometimes we just get frustrated with the puzzle and just don’t really care to work on it at all.

The puzzle I described above came to mind and I wondered if maybe God sees the image from one side and we see it from another, and we’ll only know if we’ve put all the pieces together correctly when we pass through the veil and can view it from the opposite side…