This week I met with a former pastor who gave me this description of his current situation: “My life is a puzzle box – all the pieces are there but the picture on the front has been torn off. I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.”
His income has gone up dramatically in the last couple of years allowing him to tithe more than his entire income seven years ago.
But financial success does not remove the questions about proper direction. Faster, bigger and more are sometimes just that – faster, bigger and more. Ultimately we want to see that picture of our life – a completed whole.
If I try to do something noble, humanitarian or Godly that has nothing to do with who I really am, I may look good to others and to myself for a period of time. But the fact that I am not being authentic will eventually have consequences. I may end up doing more damage than if I had not attempted this particular area of “success.” Trappist monk Thomas Merton addressed this when he said, “There is in all visible things….a hidden wholeness.”
We’re all looking for that completed picture on the front of our puzzle box – our “hidden wholeness.” Don’t be content until yours comes into view.
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