I wrote this very early on in my faith crisis. I needed a way to share with others what this felt like so they could understand what I was going through. I also needed to formulate my own thoughts and help me processes what I was feeling. I’m sharing this in hopes that others might find it helpful.
During our lives, we work on a great puzzle. We take information, ideas, people, and actions and put them into our puzzle. We have lots of different sets of puzzle pieces that we can pick from, and the picture we’re making is always changing. For instance a new job, might require ripping out existing pieces, and using putting in the new set. Likewise with a new school, a new home or a new mate. We might arrange the puzzle so we have one section for religion, another for family, politics, hobbies, etc. Whatever we find important, we find a place in our puzzle for it. Sometimes there’s an empty space that we can fit in something small, other times we have to take out other pieces to make room for it. With so many pieces available, we all end up with different pictures. Some people can choose pieces that take all of these sections and create a beautiful picture of Life.
To make our puzzles easier to figure out, there are sets of pieces that come with a lovely picture on the box and instructions on how to put it together so it fits nicely with all the other sections. Each religion has its own set of pieces, and each with varying degrees of strictness on how the pieces should be put together.
My puzzle has some really beautiful components. There is a religion set that I’ve always used and I’ve connected it firmly with many other parts of my puzzle. It comes with a nice picture on the box and direct instructions on how to order the pieces. There are people on hand to help you put the pieces together correctly, and as long as this part of the puzzle looks like everyone else’s, you can get along great with everyone else using the same set. The picture looks so lovely, you tend to forget about the people who might judge you if it doesn’t look enough like theirs, or that the makers of the set can take it away if you flat out do it wrong. You end up willing to do whatever it takes to keep that pretty part of the puzzle in place.
As pretty as this set is though, it has some pieces that are dark and ugly. It’s very confusing, because they don’t fit with the rest of the instructions in the set. They were used in the original and early instructions, and some were still used until relatively recently. But over time, people realized they can make prettier pictures without them. And while the original instructions insisted these were very core pieces, we’re now told not to use them. Some of these pieces might be used again in the future, but don’t worry about it because we’re not using them now. In fact, don’t even think about those pieces too much because you might start seeing problems with the pretty picture in the areas they used to fit. Once you start seeing those flaws, you might start seeing more that you’ve always glossed over because you were enamored with the rest of the picture and wanted to make sure that part looked like
everyone else’s.
The problem is, these puzzle pieces are so bad that you wonder how they ever came with the set to begin with. This set claims to be a universal set that everyone should use and that it’s always right for the world at the time. But these pieces that were core to the set were never right. And if those parts aren’t right, how many other pieces in the set aren’t right?
In facing that question, I risk losing this beautiful part of my puzzle that I’ve been working on my entire life. It gave structure to the entire image, as almost every other part touched it. If I rip it out, do I replace it with another set or try to come up with my own? Will the new one look as good as the old one, or bring me as much happiness and satisfaction as I received from making my old one look like everyone else’s? Will it damage the puzzles of those I’m closest to? I know the old set very well, and I’m responsible for helping my family put their own pieces together in a way that will bring them the most joy and satisfaction. If I rip this set out, what will happen to theirs? How can I show them what to put in their puzzles if I no longer know what should be in mine? My wife and I have been working
on our puzzles together. What will happen to our puzzles if they no longer match? Or, I can pretend these bad pieces from this set aren’t so bad. I can put them back in the box and forget about them, or tell myself that someday it will make sense why they were there to begin with. I can leave my picture as it is and keep trying to make it look like everyone else’s so it doesn’t stick out, and tell everyone else that this is indeed the best set to have in the world.