The challenge for storytellers is to leave out the boring parts. Most of life is made up of the boring parts. Little wonder you and I have difficulty making sense of our lives, as we live it.

“It’s a long story? Make it as short as possible, without leaving anything out!” 

Georges Simenon, author of Inspector Maigret novels

Did you know there are YouTube videos of annual puzzle competitions? Amazing to watch a roomful of people racing to complete puzzles.

Recently, I learned about puzzle boards large enough for the completed puzzle so that once started, puzzle-workers can move a puzzle from the table where working on it, saved for another day. These puzzle boards have slide out drawers underneath, serving to organize and store pieces according to placement in the entire picture. Organization drawers save time when the puzzle has to be set aside.

I usually separate pieces first, turn pieces face up, find corners and edges. Next, colors, shapes, and design.

What I have learned by piecing together puzzles, the picture on the box is a roadmap. No matter where you start, the completed puzzle is the destination.

In order to make sense of the puzzle of your life or mine, you and I need a fixed reference. We need the picture on the box. We need a view to the end from the beginning.

Speed counts in puzzle competitions, but in life, the picture on the box matters most. Without a picture, the process of fitting bits and pieces together would not only takes longer, but puzzlers, lacking a sense of purpose or meaning, would give up and abandon their search.

Without context, the content of our lives seems meaningless.

What’s the point? Pieces go back in the box. Questions remain unanswered.

In life––yours, mine, and ours––stories contribute puzzle pieces to help us as human beings see and understand how you and I fit into the larger picture.

Stories affirm eternal truths. Eternal truths are truths that never change. The Bible holds these truths about life that apply to all people everywhere throughout all times.

The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it. The world and all who live in it. Psalm 24:1

A play, a film, a book, each story sets out to describe and consolidate something true about life while leaving out the boring parts.

The narrative winds its way around characters, using setting, scenes, and plot to capture within a specific time frame what otherwise takes a very long time to unfold in real life.

Consider a movie like Saving Private Ryan, reel time, that tells the story from one man’s point of view of what living through WWII was like for him.

The director directs the actors, hoping the film’s audience will get caught up in the story and feel all the feelings, experience a reality that embeds itself in the memory of viewers, almost as if the events portrayed on screen had happened to them.

Private Ryan’s story emphasizes the cost and the value of personal sacrifice. This story helps people like you and me who didn’t live through WWII think about those persons who did.

That story puzzle piece of history reminds me that the freedoms I enjoy came at a price. It reminds me that the entire world existed before I did. That people lived and died before I was born. That people I never knew have made life better for me.

Storytellers

Writers write stories that engage readers to consider life as they have seen and experienced it, offering pieces of a smaller picture that otherwise remains in a pile of printed chipboard and puzzle dust.

In the play Our Town, Thornton Wilder treads upon that sacred territory between everyday life and the intrusion of death, in hopes that people will “realize life while they live it, every, every minute.”

Thornton Wilder’s message as a storyteller is that we all know there is something eternal about every human being. The soul is eternal and the body temporal––bound by time.

Only, most people don’t actually live their days as if eternity is reality.

In My Life

In high school I memorized parts of the play “Our Town.”  In particular, there’s a scene near the end of the play where Emily speaks to the Stage Manager.

The main character, Emily has died during childbirth. The last scene takes place in the town’s cemetery. Despite being warned and discouraged, Emily wants to return to relive one day in her life. Granted this request to observe an ordinary day, the joy at seeing her loved ones interact turns to pain.

EMILY

Let’s really look at one another! . . . It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed . . .

Wait! One more look. Goodbye, Goodbye world. Goodbye, Grover’s Corners . . . Mama and Papa.

Good-bye to clocks ticking . . . and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it–every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER 

No. Saints and poets, maybe. They do some.

Brevity of life. Certainty of death. No turning back the hands of time. Emily realized how the living often fail to appreciate life as they live it.

Stories give me a place to start puzzling to make sense of my life.

One thing for sure, I can’t complete a puzzle without moving around the entire image. But I have to start somewhere and then attach new pieces one by one. As I see where pieces fit, gradually working to finish the puzzle, certain parts start to make sense.

This takes time. And thought. Making mistakes. Making adjustments.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Sören Kierkegaard, 1813–55

The Foundation for Building a Life

The Bible tells one story. From Genesis to Revelation, it’s long. But it also doesn’t leave anything out. All the puzzle pieces are here. The Bible leaves nothing out that you and I need to live life as a Christian in this present age.

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us … 2 Peter 1:3

The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 10 that what took place in the Old Testament is written down for our instruction, continuously serving as source material to every generation as examples of how God deals with His people.

But this long, long story cannot be devoured like a meal or absorbed like vitamins.

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
    line upon line, line upon line,
    here a little, there a little. Isaiah 28:10

The Biggest Puzzle of All

Yes, the Bible is a daunting book. The Bible is 66 books, written by 40 authors over the course of about 1500 years of human history.

“Of making many books, there is no end, and much study wearies the body,” (Ecclesiastes 12:12), but the Bible sets itself apart both in declaration as God’s Word and the incarnation of Jesus, the living Word.

Sadly, far more people own a Bible than consider it indispensable. More people ignore the Bible than read it. Too many think they know what it says without reading it, repeating statements that aren’t in the Bible as though they were. Like, “God helps those who help themselves.” Uh, No.

Opponents of the Bible are blinded to its message because the Bible says that God actively hides the truth from unbelievers. Critics of the Bible react, redact, and attack the Bible to support their own beliefs and gain a following.

Yet God is not mocked. He continues to reveal Himself through His written word to people throughout His world. Those who take Him at His word are those who believe God is: “I AM that I am.”

But where do you and I start? And why bother? How does the Bible actually apply to my life? What does an ancient book have to do with contemporary life?

As a reader of the Bible for all of my adult life, I relate to the confusion of any reader who cannot comprehend the relationship between the pages in the Bible and the way you and I live everyday life.

So easy to neglect. And easier to forget.

Like New Year’s resolutions, countless individuals begin reading Genesis in January the same way they resolve to lose weight or stop smoking or give up something they know would make their life better.

But reading the Bible is not a chart with boxes for checkmarks and a pat yourself on the back when done reading it through. The first time or the fiftieth.

The Bible is a living book that meets readers the moment its pages open if and when they hunger and thirst for righteousness. Jesus said, “They shall be filled.”

Your words were found, and I ate them,
    and your words became to me a joy
    and the delight of my heart,
for I am called by your name,
    O Lord, God of hosts. Jeremiah 15:16

You and I can learn Bible stories, even confess belief that they are true. So what’s missing?

Relationship to the rest of the picture: The Big Picture that only God sees.

Puzzle boards make it easy to work on a puzzle for a while, store it under the bed or sofa until later.

Stories––yours, mine, and ours––are pieces of the vast unanswerable questions people wrestle with this side of heaven.

You and I can never comprehend the whole story, but we can keep looking at the picture on the Box.