Now that the fantasy of my book being close to done was terminated I was living in reality again and I set my sights on a new goal, Christmas 2022. My senior year I connected 20,000 pieces. I now had seven separate 10,000 piece puzzles in front of me. I went back to the storage closet in my mind to grab another box but there were none left. I was happily surprised and unsettled knowing there had to be more pieces out there somewhere. As graduation rapidly approached I realized that my fellow voyagers held the remaining pieces. I couldn’t have possibly detailed the entire semester perfectly, so I needed their help to complete my story.
I had drastically varying relational capital with those I reached out to. These conversations held moments of closure and peace, and receiving a few thousand more puzzle pieces from my friends felt like a sacred ritual. But some conversations were demented, sour enough to suck the motivation out of the rest of my day. I bluntly read word for word from my journal and was appalled to hear the denial of true events, false accusations, anger, ultimately leading to the incineration of thousands of precious pieces. My fantasy that everyone had grown from our Semester at Sea was shattered. In my frustration God helped me to realize that I too have rejected the truth. The truth of our sinfulness can be unbearable to hear, but if we continue to reject it…soon we will go deaf to it.
Confident I had all of the pieces I was ever going to receive, I placed the completed puzzles next to each other, but nothing matched up.
Heartbreak.
I wrote the book like the gospels telling the same story through eight different angles. But now with the separate stories I started to see the bigger picture in my mind’s eye for the first time. I scrambled all of the pieces, dumped them into one massive pile, visualized the picture, and created a single 85,204 piece puzzle with my eyes closed by January 2022.
When I finished, people would often ask me, “How many words is your book?” When I checked the word count I was surprised to see that Microsoft Word had kept track of many other obscure statistics. Why would I need to know my book was 1,461 paragraphs? Who cares? Why does God number the hairs on our head? Who cares? The truth is that He cares more about the most incredibly minuscule detail of your day more than you care about the biggest stressor in your life.
I also like to think about the word count of my life. How many words did I speak in my life compared to the great saints? I bet they spoke far less. I can’t write a book without using words but someone could reach Heaven without using any? A mute person who never says a word in their life only might not be able to solve a puzzle, but I bet they have a crystal clear image of the final picture. We will be remembered not by our words, but by our actions. Let’s stop trying to perfect our faith, and let’s start practicing it!