Everywhere I Go: Learning to See JesusSample

THE BIG PICTURE Romans 8:28 may be the most often quoted and misunderstood verse in all of the New Testament. It must be taken as a whole, not in pieces, for its truth to be rightly applied. For many Christmases, my wife bought one of those 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles as a family holiday project. We would get out a little card table, dump the box out, and get to the task of putting that puzzle together. I don't know if any of our boys particularly liked jigsaw puzzles, but we managed to make it into a sort of competition somehowﾗand they did like that. When you're working a puzzle that size, it helps to find the corners, then fill in the outer edge, then the interior. I can't tell you the number of times one of us said, "There has to be a piece missing. I've touched every piece on this table, and not one of them fits this space." A lot of us view life like a jigsaw puzzle. It's as if God has handed us the pieces and we struggle to make them fit. But God does not see it that way. In this puzzle we call life, He sees the whole even as we fumble with the pieces, and He causes it all to work together for our good and His glory for those who love Him, and are called according to His purpose.