I’m guessing the expression, “I love you to pieces” sounds vaguely familiar. Over the last few days of this journey, I feel God impressing upon me a bit different take to this familiar saying. Rather than God loving me to pieces, He loves me IN pieces.
At various points in my life, God has given me a vision regarding a future point in my life. Rarely when I see this vision, do I have any idea how it will be accomplished or when just a steadfast assurance that it will. This brief glimpse of a future moment in time usually serves as an anchor for me on the most difficult days when I don’t see any hope for a brighter or different one. It is during these difficult days that the picture God gave me comes to mind and I have a promise I can cling to for courage & strength. As i sit reflecting this past week how exactly the promise of Chris’s complete healing will ever be accomplished, it occurred to me that oftentimes, God’s moving in my life is similar to my son building a new LEGO set.
My oldest child loves Legos. He loves both building things of his own imagination as well as using the instructions from a brand-new box to build the new promised design. He’ll open the box and dump out all the pieces becoming more excited by the challenge that a higher piece Lego set brings. For countless hours, I’ll watch his hands painstakingly place one piece at a time on top of another so that, in time, his structure begins to resemble the promised image on the box. He’s careful & patient even when he encounters a misstep along the way. He’s learned after hundreds of sets to pay attention to the details of where each piece is placed instead of rushing ahead of the instructions assuming he knows what he’s doing. He’s learned from unnecessary frustrations of having to spend extra time taking the Legos apart & correcting his mistakes to trust the instructions & patiently place one piece at a time so that it’s built correctly the first time.
Walking through 330+ days of continual hospitalization, I’ve begun to realize our journey and God’s promised blessings come to me in pieces. God has given me reassurance that He is with us, will provide for us, and will heal Chris-in His time and in His way-not mine. However, right now, all I can see are the pieces that have been dumped out from my promised ‘blessing’ box scattered across the hospital floor. We have spent the past 330+ days, slowly, painfully slowly, placing one piece at a time on top of another, but our promised finished design is still not complete. Instead of praising the progress made as we complete one chapter after another, I focus on the pieces still undone and the design that’s still left incomplete. Somewhere along the way, I never quite developed my son’s passion to celebrate & shout, “book 1 done”…”book 2 complete”…but that’s exactly where my focus needs to be too. Not on the unplaced pieces, but on the progress that has been made.
God loves us too much to expect us to be ready with the final, promised blessing even one day too soon. Instead, He asks us to trust Him as He hands us a few more pieces which will complete the current ‘book’ and to keep trusting Him to hand us exactly what we need as we need it as we progress a little closer towards completion. God’s love and promises come to us in pieces. It’s so important that we not fear the work but trust the Designer to place the right piece at the right time on our behalf.
While it might be nice to think that Chris’s homecoming IS the finished product it’s just one more piece to a MUCH bigger set God will continue to build in us until we stand face to face with Him in heaven. Ultimately, I don’t know how much longer this ‘Lego’ set of ours will take to complete. I know that God has proven to be good and proven to be trustworthy and while I can’t see how much further we must go, I trust we’ll eventually reach our promised homecoming.
If you’re walking through a difficult season that seems as if there’s no hope or end in sight, I hope you’ll step back just a bit and realize you’re only seeing a few pieces to a much larger, much better design that God is building in your life too.
God loves you too much to give you more than your faith is prepared to handle. He loves you too much to complete His work in you even one day too early. Trust Him. Trust His timing. Trust His plan. One day, soon, all the pieces will fit together to reveal a design that will make this difficult season worthwhile.