Jigsaw Puzzles and War Games

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

- Sun Tzu – Chinese Philosopher

I love jigsaw puzzles! They require visualization and concentration to complete even when a picture is included on the box. Last Saturday, I felt the sudden need to complete a jigsaw puzzle. As I entered Barnes and Noble to select my puzzle, I noticed a huge display of strategy games along side the display of jigsaw puzzles. The strategy game titles and pictures depicted war and fantasy worlds. I was struck by the contrast of the delightful art on the puzzle boxes, which included beautiful landscapes, homes, animals, as well as covers from the Saturday Evening Post magazine that I remembered from my childhood.

We are what we envision ourselves to be. What we believe, structures our thoughts and therefore, how we interact with others creating the world we are visualizing.  However, it now seems that we are now at the mercy of uncontrollable forces invading our capacity to know love, peace, and beauty. I would be amiss to say that evil is new in history, but with the current 24-hour media, we can’t seem to turn it off and our world feels completely out of control. We are in a “war” mentality contemplating and conversing on battle strategy only we don’t know who or what we are fighting for in the game.   We cannot visualize and articulate what we aspire to be together.

I believe we need to focus less on war games, and concentrate more on visualizing and completing the jigsaw puzzles. I also remind myself that God has the entire picture in his hand, even when I am missing pieces.