A Christmas Puzzle: Day 1

But when the time had fully come, God sent forth His son…

Galatians 4:4

We just returned from a road trip to visit family “before the snow flies.” When your relatives live in the upper Mid-West, this is not an expression but a date certain.

Our first stop was planned around the fourth birthday party of our youngest grand-daughter. We got there in time to help with the decorations and stayed through clean-up and beyond. Around day 3, when the cake was gone and the helium balloons were crawling on the floor, birthday girl and I decided to take a closer look at some of her unexplored presents. Soon her five-year old sister joined us and among the boxes, we found several jigsaw puzzles.

Birthday girl was allowed to choose the first puzzle. It had thirty-five pieces and a glitter caterpillar on the box. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to share the basic rules of jigsaw puzzling.

Do you remember rule #1? Before you try to see what fits where, you set the picture on the box lid before you as your guide. Next, you find the four pieces with ninety-degree angles and, place each in the corner that corresponds with the picture. Third, find the straight-sided pieces and build a framework—straight side out-- to connect the corner pieces. Then, using the picture as your guide, you fit the puzzle pieces in the framework.

That night I was lying in bed thinking of the holidays that would be fast approaching when we got home. Somehow (our minds do crazy things in that half-conscious state) Christmas became all entangled with visions of glitter caterpillars, and out of all that, another story came together. It was the Christmas story, told not in poem or prose or music, but in puzzle form.

My jumbled half-awake musings as well as my wide-awake thoughts in the days afterward are what I will share with you this week. And as with all puzzles, we begin by setting before us a guide of what we want to ultimately produce. That guide is Scripture.

Nancy Shirah