Puzzles

It is summer and at my house that means puzzles. We spend our evenings and spare time in the afternoons putting together 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles. We do a 4th of July themed one every year and usually one or two others. Brandt and I typically do the majority of the puzzle with a little help from everyone else. For some reason, though, the puzzle we did this time had everyone participating. At one point I left my house with four teenage kids working on this puzzle- not going to the pool or playing video games or watching TV. Each one was working on a different section - one on the buildings, another on the water, someone else on the fountain, and Brandt was piecing it all together. When I got back home- the puzzle was finished. Amazing. Brandt and I can spend a couple weeks working on one- but all of our combined effort produced a finished result in a matter of days.
It reminds me a lot of how the church is supposed to work. We are all working on our section of the "puzzle". We can't always tell how our piece fits in with everything else but we work at it anyway. Fortunately God knows exactly how everything is going to fit together to create what He has in mind. And imagine if, like at my house, everyone would stop with all the distractions and focus on their "piece" how quickly we would see progress. The Bible says "The harvest is plentiful, but workers are few." He needs us to go- not to other countries necessarily- but to our grocery stores and offices and schools and PTA meetings- and see the harvest all around us of hurting, broken people that need The Answer to all their heart's deepest needs. We are important- our piece is necessary for His vision to be complete.