Ephesians 3:7-13

Ephesians 3:7-13
English Standard Version (ESV)

  I love doing puzzles.  I love doing them so much, in fact, that I had to stop doing them some time ago.  See, the problem is that I get completely absorbed in them, so lost in them that I cannot stop myself, and I find myself awake at 3 a.m. promising that I'll complete just one more piece, and then two hours later I finally go to bed.  It's such fun... yet it's exhausting, and I can't possibly bear any responsibilities, and I don't deal with distractions well, either.
  Paul is telling us that the Kingdom of God is like a puzzle, and the entirety of the picture is slowly being revealed to us, one piece at a time, and if we devote ourselves to God's work, we'll grow more and more excited as we see the reality of the whole picture come into focus.
  Right now we just have pieces, and we get excited when we combine one or two of them, but mostly we're just looking at fragments, small pieces here and there, and there is so much work still to be done, but God is at work in us, directing us and showing us how to use our pieces, guiding our hands and our lives so that we might use our time for his glory, as we reveal to the world around us the reality of the bigger picture, God at work in the world.