When Life Is Puzzling

One of our New Year's Eve traditions is to begin to piece together a puzzle....both Brad and I get addicted to this sort of thing, so we stayed up a ways after our New Year's toast with the girls to try to finish it.  We actually set a stop watch to see how long it would take us to do a 750-piece puzzle...pausing it for our snack breaks.  That is a bizarre thing to do for an activity which requires patience, right?  Luckily, with a puzzle, you can usually match the confusing pieces with the picture on the front of the box to figure out where it must go if your eye is keen enough to notice things like directions of cloud wisps or tiny dots of colors in flowers and which direction they would grow...plus how the light would reflect off of them....anyway, you get it :)  It is always interesting to me how people puzzle....I am all about the picture and shades of color on the piece, but some people are so amazing at finding the exact shape of the piece.....McKenna looks at the shapes and will say, "look for that scoopy!"....my brain doesn't naturally analyze and remember shapes as well.....so I'm like, "WHAT SCOOPY?!"

I have still been so blessed as I have watched Savannah and Danielle develop into who God is making them.  I try not to single them out much in writing now regarding the adoption because it is not so much about the how's, where's and when's of my children coming into my home, but that they all are gifts of God to me... watching all of my daughters learn what they excel at and what God is teaching them is incredible.  But Christmas brings it to my mind because it seems like so many people use that time to look back at pictures and videos of when their kids did silly things in years past and I don't have all those memories at the touch of a play button for them....but, I am so grateful for what we do have and what we are learning.

Danielle's Christmas gift of the Magic Set showed me a little more of her personality.  She has really been enjoying it and I had wondered when I purchased it for her if she would have the patience for it.  There is an instruction guide/video that you can watch where a magician shows you each trick and then explains the method to you for you to learn it.  I had imagined myself at that age just wanting to jump right into all the tricks and try them without anyone's help :P.....but, she has taken the time to learn each trick in the correct way with patience....and I have been very impressed.

Last year brought some puzzling pieces to me and, in my own thinking, these things didn't make sense....nor did I posses the magical powers to fix them with "ABRACADABRA"...though true to my nature I tried in my own strength....here's an interesting thing about that word, abracadabra, it is Aramaic for "I create as I speak"....hmmmm....that sounds a little familiar, right?  NO, I have NO magic, but I know someone who can CREATE AS HE SPEAKS....His words put puzzles together and make sense of all pictures and all shapes.....His words are available to me, speaking to me, really.....His words are the greatest words.....the most powerful words.  He always gives us the right PEACE.

I pray you will seek Him in 2016 and patiently abide in His Word.