I look at the picture on the box and back down at the 1000 jigsaw fragments strewn across my kitchen table. I get up and look at the completed frame from a different angle. I must account for the glare of the kitchen light. I walk away and then come back, only to walk away again. Alas, there is one magical piece. I rediscover renewed passion and concentration. Then, I repeat the above until the puzzle is finished.
You understand the steps above quite well if you’ve ever worked on a jigsaw puzzle. On a good day, they are a recipe for bliss and satisfaction. On a bad day, they are a resume for grief and frustration. How long can you stare at the same one-inch by one-inch piece of colorful cardboard? Why waste so much time examining something so mundane and pedantic in a world on the move?
My kitchen table has an unfinished, 1000-piece puzzle entitled “Christmas in London.” I’ve never been to London, and this puzzle doesn’t bode well for the potential of such a trip. The pieces of this puzzle vacillate between colorful exuberance and mindless mediocrity. One piece of the puzzle is laden with such significant insignificance (or insignificant significance). What are the shapes of the edges? Is that pop of red on the left side or the right side? Does this hook fit the piece next to it, or am I forcing it? Which way is the line going?
But when you match a piece, even better, connect a section to the outer frame, the joy might as well be like a great search and rescue. Such a feeling of victory accompanies such a minute detail.
Is this a helpful posture for me as I start 2024? Slowness, solitude, and focus amid a world constantly on the brink of catastrophe. And before you accuse me of privilege, take into account how little any of us can do to address the ills of our world. Social media has fooled us into believing we are more significant than we are. My life is merely a puzzle piece that adds definition and detail. My piece of the puzzle doesn’t dictate the picture, nor may it be a piece of great consequence, but when you get to the end of a puzzle and realize that a piece is missing, you see how significant that little piece was all along. The lesson of a puzzle piece is to add clarity to your tiny space, link with those beside you, and trust that a bigger picture is being created.
Your clarity may not be colorful, but one more piece gets us to the edge. Your one piece is an essential link to the whole. Ultimately, it was not whether you were a pop of color but that you were available and in the box to be dumped onto the kitchen table.
I’m making too much of the puzzle, but the act of putting a puzzle together has invited me to examine the futility of my life (in a good way). If I lock into one angle, I may miss how a piece turns differently, which makes all the difference. The glare may obscure a critical detail. My impatience may cloud an opportunity for beauty. Our lives often feel like a collection of pieces dumped on a table. We are discouraged and disheartened if we seek to make meaning from the pile. If we trust that someone is putting those pieces together, then we take heart that the emptied box doesn’t get the last word.
For us Christians, our posture to the world often seems like we have just as little faith as our atheist friends. What hope do we model if we scream our anxieties like our non-believing friends? If no one is piecing the puzzle together, then anxiety or no anxiety, this is not going to end well, no matter how righteous your anger is.
As I place piece number 463 in its rightful place (I think), I’m reminded how insignificant my day-to-day is. I get up, go to work, come home, and repeat the next day. The liturgical ordinariness of my existence doesn’t seismically shift the cosmos. Yet, in my straining and stretching to achieve the extraordinary, I miss the ordinary blessing that is my daily life. A life fragmented and longing for integration. An integration that transcends my attempts to live outside my borders.
The theologian Alister McGrath once noted that “suffering does not call into question the ‘big picture’ of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture and are thus unable to fit all of the pieces neatly into place.” My life is not marked by the suffering experienced in much of the world, a blessing for which I am both thrilled and equally troubled. But my life is contextual, locked in place by a puzzle design over which I have little control. The world’s troubles and injustices don’t remove my limitations. Instead, they call me to link arms with my neighbor and point to a reality that outlasts, outshines, and outgrows the boxes in which our many pieces and parts are found.
The last puzzle piece goes into place, and I’m reminded of the joy of completion and finality. Our society experiences great consternation over our finitude. Maybe a jigsaw puzzle can help us understand that we have limits and an end is the greatest gift and picture we could ever be granted. You need not accept my conclusion, but you’re intimately tied to the puzzle of which my life is a small part.
My prayer for you, dear reader, and me is that we would find our calling in the significance of our insignificance. Our meaning, purpose, and joy often come through the insignificant moments we toss aside in our perception of what is truly significant. As the hymn beckons, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” May you find peace with your piece.