Life is like...

...a jigsaw puzzle.

I'm sure everyone has done a jigsaw puzzle before. From the easy 10 piece puzzle to the great big 3000 piece one, you are sure to have encountered one some time in your life. The older you get, you tend to find yourself with more, increasingly tinier parts to piece together.

For sure, it's a time-consuming activity - this is the main reason I haven't dared touch one in years. Finding interlocking pieces that fit together correctly and filling in the blanks is never too easy. But it IS a lot of fun, especially if you have a deadline and a team to work on it. Acik, remember those inter-block contests we used to have? It was always an all-nighter and I'd conk out the next day, but it was so much fun I never failed to take part each year :-)

One basic trick of this game is to work on the edges first. You also compare the pieces to the picture on the box and hope to figure out where it goes. I like to divide the pieces into groups according to objects in the picture such as parts of a house, the fence, the fields, etc. Then we construct the parts and cobble them together.

Now imagine our life having parts like the puzzle. There is education, religion, family, relationships, work, so on and so forth. Each has its place in the whole. When a part is missing, the picture is incomplete.

Sometimes there are pieces that seem to fit but somehow look out of place. Or they may look like they belong there but the interlocks just refuse to click into place. Sometimes you get a set with pieces missing. Sometimes pieces disappear and you're left with a gaping hole where they should have been.

Like the game, we construct our life bit by bit. We know what should be our lives, and we try as much as we can to make the picture complete. Sometimes a piece that has been missing for a long time suddenly appears and makes a huge difference. Sometimes we are stumped and have to try our options one by one to find a suitable solution. In any case, we should not give up too fast, and patience often brings with it glory.

So friends, may we have patience in building our life, and may God bless our efforts with joy and beauty. Insya-Allah.