Over the years, I have found myself subject to the habit of people watching and this last week I found myself watching two different children, on two different occasions, putting together a puzzle. The first was a little boy. He had a large puzzle of the planets. I watched him work on the puzzle for ten to fifteen minutes. Left to his own, he would pick up one piece and tenaciously hold onto it. He would try for four or five minutes to place it with the few pieces that were already together and when it would not fit with any of them he would sit for a moment, stare at the puzzle, then try all the options again. I giggled a little inside at the way that he held so tightly to that one piece. Eventually he would move that piece to the other hand for safe keeping, and then pick up another piece and try it for a while, before reverting back to the original one. Eventually, his father ended up on the floor with him. The father sorted the pieces and then patiently handed the child a piece that would go to the area where the child was working. Sometimes the boy would still hold onto his piece, determined to place it somewhere, in those instances the father would tell him a gentle "Not yet. Try this one first."
The second observation was with a young girl. She got out a cookie sheet, dumped puzzle pieces in it, brought it to me, and announced that I would be helping her assemble the puzzle. We started putting the puzzle together and I noticed that she, like the little boy would also pick up a piece and with determination, try to find where it went. Unlike that little boy, she did not limit herself to the few corner and edge pieces that I had already put together, but she would sort through all the pieces until she found one that her original piece went with. Again I laughed inside a little. I, at my wise age of 23, knew that the fastest and easiest way to complete a puzzle was to put the edge pieces together first. Yet here I had seen in the space of two days, two children, who were completely unaware of this concept. They seemed to become attached to a piece, unwilling to set it aside for another piece that would make the work easier.
It was at this point that I thought about it from a gospel point of view. How often am I like a child with a puzzle piece? I grab hold of one idea, one dream, or one desire, and I refuse to let it go, trying instead to force it to fit into my life NOW! In many cases my desires are righteous. I want to be married in the Temple. I want a good job. I want a family. I want to travel the world. I want to go back to school or whatever else it might be. No matter how righteous or good our dreams are though, we often forget that we have a Heavenly Father who sees the whole picture and more than that, he knows where and when our puzzle pieces fall into place. I am certain that in the these cases of righteous desires He, like the boy's father, is whispering, "Not yet. Try this one first." I know that the Lord has a great plan for each of us. I know that he knows about all our wants and our needs. Sometimes he asks us to wait on our "wants" long enough to provide for a "need". I also know that as we lean a little more on His aid and guidance, we will find it so much easier to lay the foundation of eternity, through the assembly of our life's puzzle.
