My son has been working on this puzzle for weeks now….which means our dining room table is currently host to a thousand tiny, fragmented pieces of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.
What a picture of life. Scattered. Messy. Broken up into bits. The image of what we are becoming, impossible to see. We focus hard and bear down, trying to put the pieces together and make some sense of the mess. Sometimes, we shove ill-fitting pieces into the wrong places, and the picture gets even more distorted. Other times, we are hollowed out on the inside, nothing but sharp edges on our perimeter. Many times, we live haunted by the pieces that are missing.
Our hope? Knowing we are still in process. Still becoming. Still being worked on. And every once in a while, right in the middle of the mess, we get brave enough to look at the big picture…the completed one on the puzzle box that reminds us who we really are.
And we keep going, piece by piece.
I’ll never forget the day I walked through the slums of India for the first time. We were working with an organization that provides medical care and education to women and children in need, and the slums are home to some of the most vulnerable – and often overlooked – people on the planet. Of course, it’s very difficult to physically overlook them. These makeshift communities, built from scraps of metal and plastic, are literally everywhere. They aren’t confined to a specific part of town; they’re scattered in and throughout the town, springing up every couple of blocks. People can’t help but look at them, but they don’t always see them.