As I sat here trying to think of what to write for my first blog (ever, by the way), I figured that a good place to start would be a summary of what I've been discovering over the past few years. Puzzle pieces. Let me explain...

Do you remember how annoying/frustrating/humbling it was as a kid to be working on a huge puzzle and none of the pieces seemed to match? Especially if you were working on a section of, say, a sky where everything was blue and there was no reference to anything else? Come on, I'm not the only one. Then you'd try and start cramming two pieces together as hard as you could only to discover that they weren't supposed to go together and now they were all tweaked and messed up? Work with me here.

I've found that life has been like that recently...actually, probably longer, I just never realized it. I've also come to believe that God uses puzzle pieces in real life, only instead of being made of cheap cardboard, they're made of situations, choices, and trials that come our way. There have been so many times in my life that I've looked back on a situation and seen how God was orchestrating different areas of my life to come into sync at one amazing moment. Yet, as I was stuck in the middle of it, it only seemed as if these strange puzzle pieces were being thrown at me and none of them fit with the others. It was only later that I could step back and see that there was a corner here, a middle piece there, an edge down there.

With that in mind, I've now been trying to switch my mindset from trying to force all the areas of my life to fit together and make sense, to sitting back and merely seeing "puzzle pieces", knowing that God is at work somehow and will one day make sense of it all. I've seen it before, I know it'll happen again. When I try and make things happen on my own accord, I just end up with tweaked out puzzle pieces and a jumbled picture.