Several years ago, I was blessed to enjoy a retreat with my Mom, sisters, aunt, and a cousin.  That was my first time, ever, to be away from my husband and children for a full week.  It was also the first time we women had been together, as adults, for any length of time without having to care for others (our kids or husbands).  The week was remarkable. 

Of course, my oldest sister brought puzzles for us to work.  We had already worked 2 – 100 piece puzzles by the first morning, and we had been here less than 24 hours.  It goes without saying that my sister quickly completed hers, with a little help from Mom, then she helped my aunt and I finish ours.  She’s always been a whiz at working puzzles, unlike myself. 

When I started pulling together the pieces of my life back in my high school psychology class, I realized there was more to my life than met the eye, and much of it I didn’t understand.  I was no longer content to just live on the surface level of things, so I began to journey inward to make sense of it, and all the while more pieces were being added to my life puzzle.  This quest, pulling together these pieces, has been, and continues to be, an adventure that has taken me exploring through the lives of my family and friends, questioning the gifts and blessings in my life, reopening the wounds of my life and seeking healing of them, and reliving my life’s experiences, with God as the beginning and ending of it all. 

Have you ever thought about your life that way?  The first step in looking for the pieces of my life was recognizing that there were pieces to discover, that there was a puzzle, a bigger picture to my life.  When I became aware of this, my quest to pull those pieces together began.  Where would your quest to find the pieces of your life take you?  What pieces of your life need to be pulled together?   What are God’s intentions with all these pieces?  Can you trust Him with them? 

These are the questions I’ve sought to answer in my life.  I’ve prayed for God’s direction in this journey, to guide me to find all the pieces and to put them together for me.  My guess is, if you’d do the same, that you would find that your pieces come from similar areas of life such as mine.  We have all been affected by family (or the lack thereof).  Besides God, they were the first to influence our lives.  Friends and acquaintances usually formed the next pieces in our lives, interwoven with blessings and wounds experienced in the events and relationships of life.  God, of course, is the beginning and ending of it all, the One who gave life to us and the One who will be there when this life is over.