Some Assembly Required

Some Assembly Required. It doesn't set in until after a jubilant moment when you are proud of yourself for buying something that is just perfect for your children. You get home so proud that you had purchased their favorite toy and kept it hidden until Christmas and now they are asleep and it’s late on Christmas eve and you bring it to the living room where the tree is. You ignore the SAR warning on the box as you rip it open. Often you are more excited about this gift than anyone. What you see when that top is opened sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, makes the Christmas music your listening to go flat and causes the recently drank egg nog to almost come back up! There it is…a plethora of plastic pieces, taped to Styrofoam that keeps breaking on the floor, laying on top of countless plastic bags. Upon closer inspection you notice that each one of these bags has about 300 tiny screws and bolts in them. You’ve gone from being a jolly little elf to the grinch as you take each and every piece out of the box. And there, at the bottom, in its own vacuum sealed plastic bag, is the most important part…so important that the words have been translated into 20 different languages…and the diagram of parts looks more like a college anatomy exam! That’s right, its the directions for putting it all together!

Sometimes life goes through that same cycle. We get so excited about doing something that we love, something that we know God is pleased with and somewhere in the middle of all of that excitement; there are bags of other things that we find that we weren’t prepared for. And we don’t know what to do with all of them…we are surprised, shocked and even a bit overwhelmed. How does all of this go together…the joy of enjoying what I am doing is gone. Life is full of fractured relationships, broken dreams and shattered promises. Yet each of those things is part of the assembly process to make the kind of person that God created us to be.

How can you put your life back together? Stay tuned tomorrow for more...