Puzzling

Drew owns a dozen or so 3-D puzzles - most of them are famous buildings like Notre Dame. I'm not sure why, but for some reason only known to teenage boys, he decided to ditch the boxes they came in and bag them up all together in one big container. All of them mixed up. Perhaps he thought it more of a challenge to figure out how to sort them into their separate entities sans instructional pictures. Perhaps he thought they would take less space to store. Not sure.

But tonight he needed a "visual" for his Bible class, and that 3-D Notre Dame cathedral would be the ideal thing. So there he lay on the floor of his bedroom, thousands of the foamy pieces strewn around him, picking through piles of different colors and textures for the hundreds of bits of the cathedral. What a daunting project. I would have given up long ago. But he patiently combed through stacks for the gray and gold parts, setting them on the bed until he had enough to start putting them together.

At 11 I commanded him to go to bed. He was about 2/3rds of the way completed and several piles shy of sorting through the entire assemblage. I gave up and went to bed. In the morning, I found the nearly completed puzzle on the table. Apparently several pieces still eluded his search, but for the most part he had it done.

Sort of reminds me of life. By the time you get through sorting through the piles of pieces and try your best to construct something without an instruction manual or even a model, its time to retire!