My Piece of the Puzzle – 3
Find the Corners & Edges
Well, you dumped that box of pieces out on the table and all you can see is a pile of mixed up pieces. It can just look like a pile of confusion and colors. My grandmother always taught us to do something to that pile. We would start to separate those pieces and try to find some key pieces. Those pieces were the edge and four corners. To do this is there are a few things to remember.
Flip the pieces over to see what they are
Seriously, think how tough it would be to put a puzzle together picture side down. I mean you have to be able to see what they are or it is going to be so much harder to make sense of what you are looking at. In our lives we have to stop and figure out what is in our pile of pieces. What we can do with the pieces that are a part of our box can’t be figured out until we take some time to turn over parts of our lives. You never know where a piece will fit if we don’t look at the picture. Remember if you don’t flip the pieces of our life over we don’t really know what we are doing with the pieces.
Separate the pieces into the edges and corners
Crazy thing about a puzzle is that you can’t make it any bigger or smaller than the edges will let you. So when you pick out your picture you better understand that the size of the puzzle cannot change. It is the size that the box contained and that is what you get. We have to find the edges to know how and how big we are going to make our life. You need to decide just how big you want your life to be before you dump the box. The edges well set the edges. You know you can’t really build the puzzle outside of those pieces. It would just not make sense or look like the picture we chose to create. Those edges and corners sort of lead us to the next step in building our puzzle.
Eliminate the pieces you don’t need right now
After you put the edges together you have to remove all the pieces from the middle of the frame. It would be impossible to figure out what is what if we do not clear the middle. As the frame goes together you can separate the pieces. My grandmother used to have pieces of cardboard around whenever we did a puzzle. The cardboard held pieces that were similar to each other. She put them in categories to what part of the puzzle they were from. There would be 4 or 5 sections lying around. She realized that you can’t really put the puzzle together until you get the right parts in the right place. Man does that sound like a lot of work. Thing is that if you do that up front when it gets further into the puzzle it becomes a little easier to put the pieces together. Some work at the beginning can save us a lot of frustration towards the end.
Sometimes you put aside a piece now that you will use later. You don’t throw that piece away just because you don’t need it right now. You just set it aside and have it handy for when you do need to put it into the puzzle.
Start putting the frame together
As you build the frame you begin to set boundaries and figure out what will fit into your puzzle and what will not fit. You can decide what you will let into your puzzle and what you will keep out of your puzzle so that you can see clearly what fits and when. These corners and edges set the entire size and scope of our lives. It will contain all that our picture is made of. The frame is important because it will shape the entire puzzle. So find those pieces and make them fit together so that they frame your life into something beautiful.
We need to think about a couple of questions as we find the edges. What will you remove from the middle so that you can begin to form a frame that will work for completing the puzzle of your life? What will be your four corners, which define the edges? What is most important to you that you better make sure makes it into the puzzle?