You may have seen my post awhile back about vision. I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of vision the past few weeks. It has been a good process, but I didn’t quite feel like I really had a good handle on any sort of conclusions. Was it ok for me to be without a clear vision? For almost six years my decisions have been filtered through the semi-narrow vision of gospel work and Colombia. Now that I’m here, I wasn’t sure what to look at for “the next thing.”
As always, God has a plan of when and how to reveal His purposes to us. Last Friday, I decided to give my pastor at home a call to say hi and catch up. At one point, we started chatting about vision. “What’s the difference between having a vision and destination-focused thinking?” I asked.
The answer solved a lot of my problems. The picture is one that I’m confident will remain in my mind for a long time.
Life is like a 1,000-piece puzzle (or is it 10,000 pieces?). I’ve never been into puzzles very much. I don’t have the patience or the interest to sort through piece after piece matching shapes and colors. I can imagine, though, that it’s quite thrilling to see a work like that come into shape.
If I think of my life and the vision for my life as that puzzle, I don’t get frustrated when I can’t see the whole picture. Instead, I need to recognize which pieces I need to put in place right now. “It might not look like anything yet, but maybe the section you’re working on is part of a rose bush,” my pastor said. As he shared, I looked up to my right at the 1,000-piece puzzle framed hanging in the house (one of 6!) and my attention was immediately drawn to the flower bushes by the house.
“Maybe there are ten pieces that you need to put in place in the next three months.” The important thing is that I don’t let life simply drift by without putting any pieces in place! When I finish the rose bush, I can take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see how it fits.
What piece are you working on today? What is one “image” that has helped you understand something in a new way?