When a Puzzle Stops Being Fun

Issue #12, March 11, 2023

Mar 12, 2023

I have a friend who loves puzzles (Hello, friend). She loved them before Covid boosted their popularity and even now as the sales have settled back down, she still loves puzzles.

In your opinion, what makes a puzzle a good puzzle? I asked her once. What I took away from her answer was this: A puzzle should feel like a challenge, but it shouldn’t feel impossible. There should be some order to the chaos, the patterns or colors or shapes should almost guide you like a map through the puzzle. (I believe there was also a zero-tolerance policy for cat-themed puzzles, but that doesn’t factor into today’s newsletter.)

Even equipped with the guiding words of my friend, I’ve found that I have about a 50/50 percent chance of choosing a “good” puzzle. Sometimes I end up engaged until the very last piece, other times the puzzle sits abandoned for a week and then a month and then finally it’s cleaned up and put away or sent off to the thrift store.

A puzzle with attractive art and with organization that I find helpful.

For a good while now I’ve imagined my body like a thousand-piece puzzle that I don’t know how to solve. It’s been five years since my body erupted into daily pain and over the years there have been medicines, supplements, eating restrictions, alternative practitioners, and western doctors. Each one is a piece that must be tried first to find out if it’s a true fit. Each piece invites hope and ends in disappointment when the pain remains unchanged, when the piece turns out to be wrong after all. More than one practitioner, after confirming that my body reacts unpredictably to medicines, has commented (unhelpfully, I might add), “You are a medical mystery!” I’ve often wanted to throw all the pieces back in the box but abandoning this puzzle isn’t really an option when chronic pain is the problem.

I wish my body was the kind of puzzle I bought for my kids when they were toddlers. You know, the wooden puzzles with maybe six pieces, and each piece had a wooden handle to aid their pudgy, uncoordinated hands. We had one that was a collection of shapes and another one with farm animals. As the parent I could easily see the solution and it required patience while my child tried to put the circle where the square piece was obviously meant to go. To a one-year-old, however, a simple wooden puzzle probably compares to how I view some of the complicated puzzles we own.

One of the puzzles we’ve held onto for future grandkids.

How does God see my puzzle as he sits beside me while I work at it with my pudgy, uncoordinated hands? I believe that God sees my puzzle with complete clarity. I believe he can clearly see the solution to the puzzle, just as I could when I sat alongside my toddler. Sometimes thinking about it that way makes me incredibly angry. Enough already, God, just finish the puzzle.

The other day my son, renowned in our household for his dislike of puzzles, sat down to do a puzzle with me. I started picking out all the edge pieces, as one does, but instead of joining me he started working on the inside of the puzzle. I stared at him, aghast at his blatant disregard for proper puzzle etiquette. Isn’t it in a rule book somewhere? You put the edges of the puzzle together first and then you work on the inside.

Early on when I asked for physical healing the Lord told me, “I am healing you, but I am healing your heart pain right now, not your physical pain.” I wanted him to start with the outside, but like my son, God was starting with the inside pieces. The massive anxiety that showed up with the physical pain drove me to counseling and for the first time in forty years, I started dealing with the Big, Hard Stuff that I had been shoving down in a dark space in order to manage day to day.

I can feel the evidence of his hand on those pieces. All the stretching and breaking and stitching of my heart has been slow work with a big payoff. I’m far enough along in that healing that I wouldn’t go back to the state I was in before my health crisis hit, even if it meant the chronic pain was gone. I can even see strong connections between the emotional and physical pain, though healing one hasn’t automatically healed the other.

I bought this puzzle because it bears the image of a bookstore we visited in Paris last September. But that fun connection didn’t keep me from being angry at the puzzle for most of the time that I worked on it. Too many similar colors, too many repeating patterns.

At the same time, I have regularly told God that anytime he’d like to do the heart healing without the presence of the physical pain, I’d be very happy about the shift. Although I see God’s severe mercy, that doesn’t mean I always welcome it.

I’m entering another round of trying out pieces. In this case, that means another round of visiting doctors and taking new medications. Sometimes the outside pieces of a puzzle look just like the inside pieces, and you must wait until the puzzle is almost done to know which piece you are holding in your hand.

Share Good and Beautiful Things

Words to Remember

“The longest, slowest, best journey of my life has been the path from head to heart.”

-Shannon Truss, excerpt of her poem, From Head to Heart

From the Sketchbook

Birds

Birds

And More Birds

Favorite Finds

Puzzles

We’ve enjoyed mini-puzzles as an occasional break from large puzzles that fill up the kitchen table.
Along that note, this Advent puzzle set makes a great gift. It includes twelve miniature puzzles leading up to Christmas day.
A Cat Puzzle I have on my Amazon wishlist.

Poem

Next Saturday I am heading to a half-day retreat on poetry and prayer with poet Pádraig Ó Tuama. Pádraig is a poet as well as the host of Poetry Unbound and has just released a new book inspired by that podcast. Here is a link to one of my favorite poems of his, read in his own fantastic brogue: The Facts of Life.

Blessings from the Guest Nest,

-Aimee