Marcia Sietstra:  Pastor

As some of you know, I like to do jigsaw puzzles. When I was a research assistant for a theology professor in seminary, one day when he found out that I love jigsaw puzzles, he said, "That figures. You have such a strong need to accomplish things; you’ve even found a leisure activity that produces something."

Recently I read a story about jigsaw puzzle-making that I want to share with you. It’s from one of my favorite books, Kitchen Table Wisdom. The author tells this story:

"All through my childhood my parents kept a giant jigsaw puzzle set up on a puzzle table in the living room. My father, who had started all this, always hid the box top. The idea was to put the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. Different members of the family and visiting friends would work on it, sometimes for only a few minutes at a time, until after several weeks hundreds and hundreds of pieces would find their place…"

[Continued, paraphrased] Over the years, I got quite good at [ doing puzzles]…I especially loved the time when the first hint of a pattern would emerge and I could see what had been there, hidden, all along.

The puzzle table was my father’s birthday present to my mother when I was three or four and I did not understand my mother’s delight. They hadn’t explained this game to me, doubtless thinking I was too young to participate. But I wanted to participate, even then.

Alone in the living room early one morning, I climbed on a chair and spread out the hundreds of loose pieces lying on the table. The pieces were fairly small; some were brightly colored and some dark and shadowy. The dark ones seemed to be shaped like spiders or bugs, ugly and a little frightening. They made me feel uncomfortable. Gathering up a few of these, I climbed down and hid them under one of the sofa cushions. For several weeks, whenever I was alone in the living room, I would climb up on the chair, take a few more dark pieces, and add them to the cache under the cushion.

So this first puzzle took the family a very long time to finish. Frustrated, my mother finally counted the pieces and realized that more than a hundred were missing. She asked me if I had seen them. I told her then what I had done with the pieces I didn’t like and she rescued them and compete the puzzle. I remember watching her do this. As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded. I had not known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the game had made no sense.

What if life is like that jigsaw puzzle? Life provides all the pieces. We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. Unfortunately we can only see life a piece at a time. And some of those pieces we’d just as soon put behind us out of sight. The pain of a loss of a loved one. Or the pain of anticipating death. Or the pain of a failure of some kind. "But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger."

Today we light candles in memory of loved ones who have passed from this life to the next. We mark our painful experiences of deep loss. It’s a good day to ask ourselves: Could it be that a somewhat hidden picture of great beauty requires that we accept every last piece of life’s puzzle as a gift, even the painful pieces?

I have been with people who have experienced profound loss and grief but who found unsuspected meaning that began to emerge from the fragments of their lives. For some, that new meaning came out of having cancer. Perhaps it was the freedom to finally take the time to notice the little blessings of life, or to work on relationships that one has neglected.

And there is a kind of transformative strength that comes only to those who have suffered. My early experiences with death made me an angry teenager for awhile, but in the end enabled me to transform the simplistic, harsh religious beliefs I’d been taught, in favor of a life-long search for meaning and truth. I was given, early on, the gift of realizing that bad things happen to good people, that the Bible doesn’t provide clear answers on why God allows death to happen. And those early experiences prepared me to help others deal with death, and to face death fearlessly.

What if we were to reframe death as just another puzzle piece in a lovely picture of your life? Facing death can make it an ally. If your life could end at any moment (and it could, for any one of us) how do you want to spend this present moment? How can you use the ever-present possibility of death to help you live each moment more fully and passionately?

A physician whose books I love says that when patients find their way to this viewpoint on life they seem to become intensely alive. Instead of reacting to losses and suffering with bitterness or victimization, one patient with HIV/AIDS puts it this way: I have let go of my preferences and am living with an intense awareness of the miracles of the moment." Or in the words of another patient, "When you are walking on thin ice, you might as well dance."

Some people are able to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it instead of wishing to change the inevitable. You know some people like that right in our midst! These people define joy in a new way. Joy is not the same as happiness or fun. Joy is more the deep down acceptance and satisfaction with life’s gifts, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations.

Joy is more a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. It is loving in spite of the possibility of loss, participating in the game of life without thought of winning or losing, but with a powerful kind of openness to whatever comes.

I think people with trust in God are the most likely to develop this confidence that no matter what happens to us, we are held in the hand of God for all time. It gives us a sort of fearlessness. And so we live in that wild abandon, that joy of watching the pieces come together, trusting God with the hidden picture of our lives. Decisions made from this perspective are not fear-driven; decisions made from this perspective are life affirming. Even the dark pieces of life are no longer enemies, but rather one more piece of a whole

"There is a fundamental paradox here. The less we are attached to our own preferences, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life. The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become." Embracing life is more about trusting that the experience will have its own gifts and meaning, and that the whole picture of your life is being revealed…more about trusting the God of life in whose hands we exist.

Today as we remember dear ones who have passed from this life to the next, I invite you to remember people in your life that you have had to say goodbye to. You are welcome to come forward and light a candle in memory of anyone you have lost at any time in your life. May it be a sign that you accept this puzzle piece in your life, though it may have been a dark and gloomy one, for it is part of the whole of the life God is giving you.