I enjoy doing puzzles, but I rarely made time for them until the Corona virus shut everything down. I spent most Sunday afternoons at an assisted living facility for the last six years, but since I am not allowed to enter right now, our family has been doing puzzles on Sunday afternoons. We have completed 15 or 16 so far and are gradually covering the walls of our stairway with the finished products once they are glued. We turn on Christian music, make a pot of coffee, retrieve a package of Oreos from the pantry, and sit around the table singing praise and trying to fit the pieces together.
I am convinced certain activities are important for Christians to do because they so strongly connect analogically with our faith. Everyone should grow a garden or plant flowers, everyone should take care of some kind of livestock--or have a dog the size of a small horse--and everyone should take long walks or runs if only for a while because these activities relate so well to our lives as believers. They help us see aspects of our walk with Christ in ways we might not otherwise. You don’t always have to be a gardener, husbandman or walker, but a little practice and experience will teach you a lot that will be useful for many years.
I’m beginning to wonder if every Christian ought to build puzzles for the same reason. None of the prophets or apostles said we should, so maybe not. Can you imagine the prophet Elijah doing a puzzle? I’m sure Ezekiel had the patience to do so, and a few dozen puzzles might have been a welcome distraction while laying on his side and besieging Jerusalem for more than a year. But it seems obvious there are benefits to reconstructing an image from many separate pieces. I don’t mean the cognitive benefits--working puzzles is like exercise for your brain. I mean the spiritual and pedagogical benefits.
When we began building puzzles during the lockdown, one of my children, who shall remain nameless, sat down for 3.132 minutes, fiddled with a few pieces, and then announced she didn’t have the patience to work puzzles. That is kind of the idea. I don’t like sitting still either, but it’s a skill we have to learn. To slow down, look, think, and patiently work knowing you won’t be done for a long time. You can build a puzzle by yourself, plenty of people do, but what’s the fun in that? You can do an “easy” puzzle, one with relatively few pieces and whose image has so much variation that every piece’s place is obvious. That can be fun, once in a while, but what’s the point? The activity should stretch and challenge us if we want to profit from it. Not every puzzle has to be hard, and few should seem impossible, but we only grow by working against resistance, whether that resistance comes from a kettlebell, a Scripture memory habit, or putting together a puzzle.
Of course, some may say it’s a pointless exercise. Why invest many hours only to hang a picture on the wall? You could have simply bought the picture and been done! But the exercise is far from pointless. We are not utilitarians, and of all people in the world, Christians should be most sensitive to the value of restoration and renewal through thoughtful ritual and repetition. The finished puzzle is a signpost of hours spent together, memories made, and stillness learned.
Some of you may hate building puzzles, and if so… thanks for reading this far. But in my book, that is even more reason to cultivate a puzzle habit, even if only for a while. When I was a younger man, I had no use for puzzles. They were made for small children and old people. It was the same restlessness that sees little point in visiting nursing homes to greet people who won’t remember you came or listening attentively to an older person share the same stories for the 193rd time. Why be diligent in cutting the grass since you have to do it again next week anyway? It is a restlessness that causes us to think about how to respond rather than really listening to someone else speak, that makes us frantic to fix problems now and unable to wait or tolerate delays with a good attitude. It is the same immaturity that makes us self-assured in our understanding and solutions to problems. Regarding the latter, I cannot describe how humbling it is to find the final edge piece only after searching every individual piece by hand four times, or discovering that the piece you knew had to fit there will only fit if you turn it another direction, or finishing a puzzle except for two pieces and suddenly realizing that somewhere in that mass of grass you must have forced a few pieces where they didn’t belong.
Puzzle building is pain and aggravation, struggle and frustration, and it turns out these are good for our sanctification.
By the way, the child that didn’t have the patience for puzzles has become one of our best builders. It’s amazing how quickly a person can learn and grow with a little application of self-discipline. It’s a lesson not only for becoming a better puzzle-builder, but for learning to be a more faithful and productive servant of God. --JME
