Lord, you started to say something this morning as I was getting ready to leave the house, and I found it extraordinary, and I kind of cut You off, because I was so afraid I would forget it, and I wanted to write it down. So can we start that whole conversation again, please? I was trying to wrap my mind around uniqueness versus self-centeredness, and that is when You interrupted.
Yes, you were thinking, as you often do, in dualities. Selfish or self-centered versus self-sacrificing or self-denying.
Yes, that was it! And You said there was a Third Way! Please, tell me again.
I told you to think about a jigsaw puzzle. Being selfish or self-centered would be like thinking you are the most important piece in the puzzle. Being self-sacrificing or self-denying in this sense does not mean putting the needs of someone else ahead of your own, which you all need to do from time to time, but not always, or in every single circumstance. Being self-denying as it relates to the puzzle would be to say, my piece is not important at all. The puzzle doesn’t need my piece.
The truth is, every piece is important to the puzzle. Have you ever tried to complete a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing? Isn’t it frustrating until you figure out that not all the pieces are in the box? And if you get nearly finished and then discover a piece is missing, don’t you feel a great sense of let-down, of frustration, because without that one missing piece, the puzzle is incomplete.
Further, by trying so hard to be inconspicuous, even absent, that missing piece actually becomes, in a negative sense, the first thing you notice when you look at the puzzle in its entirety. You notice what is missing, not all the pieces that are there, in their places. You notice the lack first. By trying to be of no importance, the missing piece actually becomes the most important.
But what happens when every piece is in its place? The whole puzzle fits together, no matter how many pieces there are, no matter how intricate the pattern or design. Each tiny piece is essential to complete the pattern and to create the whole.
If everyone simply accepted this fact, that every piece is essential and important, that everyone has a unique contribution to make, and gifts to share with the world, what a different world you would inhabit!! No one would be trying to occupy the wrong space. No one would be vying for a larger or more important position. Every piece would be revered if only everyone had as a goal completing the whole picture. There would be no war and no enmity, for the purpose of completing the pattern would predominate over every other concern.
So do not worry about taking up more space, or less space, or no space. Take your place, fit yourself in to My Grand Design, and watch everything fall into place, like pieces of a puzzle, all around you.
But Lord, what if some pieces won’t play? I mean, what if some demand a larger share of the puzzle, or refuse to be a part of it at all, even if their motives for refusal are shyness, or fear, or even, they have been told they mustn’t take any public place?
Don’t worry about other pieces. Just diligently search to find your own niche, your own place, and your own shape there. Complete your part of the puzzle in real time, in the time given to you. Do your part in making the picture beautifully and wonderfully complete.
So, Lord…I had this idea, what photograph to make to accompany this, and it is a Lion puzzle I have, which I thought was neat, because of the Chronicles of Narnia, and Aslan, so I chose it, and set up the image and realized after I clicked my shutter that the gap formed shows a heart! A heart on its side.
Yes, that was My little gift to you tonight. Can you dare to believe that you, as an individual and as a stand-in, as it were, for every human on the planet, that you complete My Heart? It’s true. Every human, as each one becomes his or her best self, completes My Heart, fills in the gaps that My Love has created specifically for them to find and fill. My Love is fully complete, you see, when it is received and shared.
God, You are amazing. Thank You.