The Ginger Twins get an allowance every other week. While we don’t pay for chores, if they’re not completed, the kiddos can expect a deduction in allowance. I tell you this so that you can understand how much they look forward to the event we like to call “ohmygoshwejustgotourallowanceletsdropitallintotheclawmachineatwalmart” that happens every other week. Every. Other. Week. They work hard at their chores, homework, and anything else on their list that’s required to earn a full allowance. After which, we will head to town and it never fails, the claw machine sucks LM in like a giant glass pied piper. For a very long time, she was on a no-fail streak. Every time she’d pop a dollar in, she’d win. Ipods. Stuffed bears. You name it, and 90% of it she’d give away to whoever was with her at the time. If only there were fully paid claw-machine athletic scholarships, I would have let her continue her streak but alas, there are none.

At some point, I told her that yes, while claw-machine-grabbing is a wonderful ability to have, she should save her money and get something useful with it. A toy. A game. Save for something, give some. Because at some point, you’ll start to put money into the claw and end up with nothing in return. A few weeks of that lesson hard learned, she decided that yes, it would be wise of her to spend her allowance on something tangible.

This month, she’s been into art projects. We purchased her first cross-stitch kit, and are saving money for a rug latch kit. For my birthday this weekend I asked for a “guilt-free stroll through the Hobby Lobby where I can take as much time as I want looking at everything in every single aisle… and a pumpkin pie”. Luckily for the GT’s, Hobby Lobby weekend also fell on allowance weekend. Woo hoos all around! Hubs and LH went off to look at hobby cars, airplane kits, and pirate-ship-themed art, while LM and I wandered through crafts, latch kits, cross-stitch and scrapbooking. Eventually, we wandered through the puzzle aisle.

So often, I think of life as a tapestry – a cross stitch of sorts. There are two ways to look at this – either we see the brokenness, mistakes, missteps, and heartache from the back of the tapestry while God sees the beautiful picture from the front… or that in the case of cross stitch, we see the front, never realizing that God is at work crossing this path with that path, weaving this in and out, changing thread colors as necessary to create the finished masterpiece.

But staring at those little boxes with their beautifully completed cover art, I realize that God works in puzzles as well.

Have you ever thought about the process of puzzle-making? Unlike tapestries and cross-stitch, puzzle-making starts with the finished product. The photograph is complete, with cohesively flowing colors and scenes. It’s finished in entirety and adhered to something stable for support. The cuts are designed, and pieces are cut out, with all of the cut puzzle pieces packaged together for the future owner to assemble. And what do we, the future owners, do at that point when we get that box with 1,000 pieces? We match the pieces together. First this piece, then that. Soon we have a small section that fits up with this other small section to form something larger. Throughout the entire assembly process of the puzzle, we are working piece by piece to work towards a beautiful finished product. Our friends. Our loved ones. Our careers, support systems, events, vacations, interactions, and heartaches are all puzzle pieces that will eventually be pieced together. At the end of our lives, we’ll finally get to see how they all matched up to create one perfect piece of art.

If you think of each individual piece though… sometimes they don’t look like much. Sometimes the pieces are bright and happy, sometimes they’re dark or black as night. Sometimes the shapes are odd, they don’t seem to fit, or you get to the edge of something and have to turn a corner. Sometimes those stinking pieces don’t look like they belong at all and you just want to toss them in the trash – I’ve been there and thought, “What is this doing here? This doesn’t belong in my puzzle! It’s not the right shape, size, theme, career, neighborhood, state, church, task…” yada yada yada! But listen, friend, every piece of the puzzle is important. It’s easy to mistake a small section for the entire puzzle because to us that section is so big and so important! It’s easy to focus on one piece that IS the most beautiful piece of the entire puzzle. But to God, every piece – yes, every piece is important for the puzzle that makes up YOU. Each piece is necessary, relevant, and beautiful to Him, who is our ultimate stable support in the puzzles of our lives.

So hang in there, friend. If you’re looking at the ugliest puzzle piece that you’ve ever seen, a piece that doesn’t seem to fit, or struggling to match up the next piece, just remember it’s just a piece, not the finished product. God has already seen that, and it is breathtaking.

Cheering for you,

XOXO,

Karen

photo credit: Creative Commons via photopin (license)