Puzzle Pieces

I've been thinking about puzzle pieces all day ... the way things fit just right. The pieces might look odd alone, but together they make sense.

We've been in a lot of different styles and formats and sizes of fellowship these past eight months. From five of us sitting in an apartment with praise on our lips, to crowded grass-roofed clay buildings with an old gas-can serving as the tambourine, to programs where entrance is based on your passport, to standing among thousands while singing along to a well-polished praise band, to a side-street mission that hosts a fascinating blend of young artists and the down-and-out. All different pieces to the same puzzle. Each looks and feels different, and sometimes might not even make a lot of sense, until you step back and look at how they all fit. We know because WE fit in each one. We might not have always looked or felt like we did, but nonetheless each was home when the name of the Son was lifted up.

We've also been in and out of so many types of homes and families it can make the head spin. Each fascinatingly shaped and crafted to fit into one amazing trip this year. This particular puzzle is nearly complete - almost every piece has now been fit together and we can look back on a beautiful piece of work that didn't always make sense if we were looking at just one piece or another.

But the other puzzle - the one that all us oddly shaped pieces make up as believers - that one's not complete yet. Maybe soon. Maybe Someone is looking at a nearly completed picture. Maybe there are still a lot of missing pieces. We've seen only the tiniest corner, but it's beautiful ...