The mission of the Turning Point Counseling Center:  This Christ centered ministry has but one mission – to equip all of God’s people to make spiritually mature decisions for their lives and accept the responsibility for those decisions.

The other day, I read a beautiful story that conveys a significant truth.  It truly blessed me, so I share it with you as a gift.  It is written by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and is from her book:  Kitchen Table Wisdom:  All through my childhood, my parents kept a giant jigsaw puzzle set up on a puzzle table in the living room.  My father, who had started this always hid the box top.  The idea was to put the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time.  Different members of the family and visiting friends would work on it, sometimes for only a few minutes at a time, until after several weeks hundreds and hundreds of pieces would each find their place.  The puzzle table was my father’s birthday present to my mother.  I can see him setting it up and gleefully pouring pieces of that first puzzle from the box onto the tabletop.  I was three or four years old at that time, and I did not understand my mother’s delight.  They hadn’t explained this strange game to me, doubtless thinking I was told to participate.  But I wanted to participate, even then!  Alone in the living room early one morning, I climbed on a chair and spread out the hundreds of loose pieces lying on the table.  The pieces were fairly small; some were brightly colored and some dark and shadowy.  The dark ones seemed like spiders or bugs, ugly and a little frightening.  They made me feel uncomfortable.  Gathering up a few of these, I climbed down and hid them under one of the sofa cushions.  For several weeks, whenever I was alone in the living room, I would climb up on the chair, take a few more dark pieces, and add them to the hiding place under the cushion.  Well, this first puzzle took the family a very long time to finish.  Frustrated, my mother finally counted the pieces and realized that more than a hundred were missing.  She asked me if I had seen them.  I told her what I had done with the pieces I didn’t like, and she rescued them and completed the puzzle.  I remember watching her do this.  As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded.  I had not known there would be a picture!  It was  quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach.  Without the pieces I had hidden, the puzzle had made no sense.  Today, this makes me wonder what it would be like if we loved life without condition.  Life provides all the pieces.  When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time—the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss, or a failure, I was trying to put behind me out of sight.  But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger.  What brief glimpses of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift every last piece.

 

Do you have some hidden pieces of your life, which if dealt with could give you a better picture of the journey.  Let’s walk it together.  Please call me at 507/645-8252  ext. 13.

 

Neale C. Thompson

Spiritual Pastoral Counselor

 

 

 

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