The Mystery of the Unknown Puzzle

My oldest son arrived home from a weekend trip to his grandfather’s house excited over his new gift. His grandfather had bought him a five hundred piece puzzle. In his excitement to open the puzzle he tore the box into shreds and dumped the pieces on the ground. Not giving it much thought his grandfather picked up the frayed box and threw it in the trash while telling my son to put the puzzle pieces into a large zip-lock bag. He arrives home with his puzzle pieces in a bag and determined for me to begin the process of putting the puzzle together. The only problem was I had no idea what the finished product looked like. My son tried to describe the picture for me. It was a space landscape complete with stars, planets, and space satellites. There might have been a green little Martian man also but he couldn’t remember. I asked him if he was sure he had all the pieces and he assured me that he did and we could count them if I wanted. We didn’t have a clear portrait of the puzzle and we were not confident that all the pieces were in the bag. Sounds like life.

Someone recently asked me if I could would I want to know the future. Would I want to know how certain things turned out? It might not be a bad thing to know if the Atlanta Braves were ever going to make it to the playoffs again but would I want to know the intimate future details of my life? I am not so sure. I believe in the power of mystery. I believe it is the things that lie beyond our comprehension that challenges us and makes us creative individuals. Einstein once wrote that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” The unexplainable and indefinable future leaves us with a sense of awe. It leaves us convinced that we don’t have all the answers and maybe we will never be able to explain completely the outcome of events or circumstances. Living on the edge of the known and unknown forces us to realize that life is bigger than ourselves. It leaves us with a choice. We can put all the mysterious pieces of life back into the bag and coward to the unknown or we can, piece by piece, and with the grace of God start putting the pieces of our life together even if we are not so sure of the outcome.  We may not know the future but we can know who holds the future. It is this One that the Psalmist speaks of when he says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139).