Puzzles – Adventure With Brendan

October rushed by me in a whirlwind of beauty and chaos. Parent teacher conferences, zoom sessions with my remote students, and more work than I ever could imagine was broken up by a weekend trip to Breckenridge, a hunting trip, and my wife’s birthday. Through it all, I’ve tried to keep my eyes, my ears, and my heart open to all that God has for me. But that didn’t give me time to blog. However, I did have time to remind myself that no matter how my day was going, my heart matters!

Has beauty been mixing with chaos for you? It’s 2o2o so how could your year not feel like a whirlwind, but if you’re seeking to guard your heart, you’ve seen beauty too.

Hearts are key to how we live. Proverbs 4: 23 tells us to protect our hearts above all else because they are the wellspring of life. So here is what I have been doing to feed my heart the right stuff.

I wrote briefly about this idea this summer, and it still rings true. Throughout 2020 I have been reminding myself that my heart matters. I am in full control over what goes into my heart. This includes chaos of all kinds. Election chaos. Job chaos. Health chaos. So I have been spending less time on social media. All chaos seems to be driven by social media. In February at the start of Lent, I gave up social media, and it was freeing, but since Easter I’ve been back on, and well, we seem to be a society that loves to stir up hate and anger. And now with the election just behind us, school districts going full remote in order to protect the health of the community, but causing chaos for the families back home, it seems like the best time to either stay off Facebook and all social media all together or let your anxiety rise. If you disagree with me about this statement you might as well unfollow me (just kidding, but how many times have you seen that statement on Facebook?).

Because my heart matters, I am not interacting with people after a certain hour. If I jump onto any of my social media platforms later than usual, I typically just go to look at my picture history so God can remind me of the beauty he has for me. Instead of spending time on social media, I am looking for beauty and things that bring me joy. Mostly this means I hang out with Gyffin. A walk with my dog guards my heart way better than a scroll through my newsfeed. Today I spent an hour kicking the ball for him. I couldn’t stop laughing. I’ve found that I’m a way better man after spending time with my dog. That man is more of the man God meant when he created me.

April and I are still doing puzzles. I’ve talked about the greatness of puzzles in the past. Here is something you might not know about puzzles. Puzzles are a great metaphor for life. We started this one on Halloween and we quickly realized it was too big for our puzzle board. After days of trying to fit pieces here and there we nearly gave up. But we didn’t. April is better at taking the small pieces and building them into a bigger picture, but she bounces around seemly leaving sections to finish themselves. I focus on small areas and work to complete those parts first which at times bogs me down and causes frustration when I can’t find the one piece I’m looking for. We build puzzles differently and I think this helps us complete the picture. There were times when we thought we had the wrong pieces, too many pieces, and then finally one too few. I didn’t want to give up. I searched until I found that piece. We had just enough. I know this is just a puzzle, but maybe it’s more. Maybe we have just enough and that is perfect for now. This calms my heart.

Last month when I went hunting God gave my heart what I needed even though it wasn’t what I was hunting for. I’ve been hunting for almost 21 years now and I have never been all that successful. The first time I went hunting was a puking mess. A migraine struck as I trekked up the trail. I spent the entire trip throwing up or passing out upside own on a rock. The second time I went hunting I fell off a boulder head first. The third time I went hunting my dad and I spent two days tracking a Bull Elk I had grazed with a bullet. Hunting can seem like an experiment in taking naps in weird places, but even though I haven’t always filled my tag and I don’t feel like the best hunter, I have learned that hunting is more about my heart than about the Elk. This year on our first morning my dad and I chose to hunt on harder stretch of the mountain. We hiked up and down the mountain. Over so many fallen trees that my legs were shot. The beauty on the trail made up for the lack of a harvest. However, when we returned to camp we heard how our friends saw Elk, but couldn’t get a shot off. They had chosen the easy path and saw Elk, but came out empty. To fight off the disappointment I had to remind myself that hunting is more about my heart than about Elk. Its about constantly expecting God to provide no matter what. He provided in a different way than with Elk. Our early mornings led us to beautiful sunrises and golden Aspen trees and our evening meals provided us with laughter. I needed this time away. It filled my heart with what it needed and now that the chaos of life has set back in I feel like I can give back healing, hope, peace, love and joy.

Beauty. I want to learn how to find beauty in my daily life. At a retreat I went to last fall New York Times best selling author John Elderedge challenged me to let beauty heal me. He said, “Like oxygen and water we need beauty daily to restore us from a word assaulting our souls.”

Beauty in the unexpected, like just over three years ago when I bought the most beautiful diamond so that I could propose to the most beautiful woman. On February 17th, we will celebrate my birthday and three years since I surprised her with a ring during a tropical storm at Universal Studios. It was beautiful. Yet, those magnificent days have become normal and I need beauty to heal me.

This year I am pursing life with the theme of a beautiful adventure. Beauty is not just aesthetic; it is the small moments of kindness. But sometimes fighting for beauty can be a little dirty. That’s where grace pops in.

Like last year when April bought me tickets to see Elevation Worship. Well, she had meant to buy me tickets. Something came up and all of a sudden it was the day of the concert and it was sold out. We decided to go and see if we could pick up a ticket in the parking lot. April was in tears. She knew how much Elevation Worship’s music meant to me. As I struggled with insomnia, their music helped remind me that even when things seemed bad, God promised me that the best is yet to come. So as we walked up to the doors to the venue for the concert, I said a small prayer. “Are there any tickets for sale,” I asked. The guy in the ticket booth smiled. “There are two at will call just for you.” God knew what I needed. The night was beautiful, it helped in my healing, and I wouldn’t have experienced it if I had decided to give up when we read that the tickets were sold out.

That is the spirt I want to live with this year. Step out into the unknown and let God surprise me with a beautiful adventure. But this year started out with a horrible cold and sometimes beautiful adventures end up in the trash can.

January started off with a monster of a cold. The only thing we could do was work on our puzzles. As I mentioned in my last blog, we have become puzzlers. And as Christmas and New Year’s season should go, we worked on multiple Star Wars puzzles. The best, and hardest, was a puzzle of The Mandalorian and The Child. As cute as Baby Yoda (check out his top ten moments in the link) is, the puzzle was super difficult. All of the pieces were monochromatic so it was difficult to piece them together. Yet, we persisted one piece at a time, or actually as we reached the end, two pieces wouldn’t fit and we realized several pieces were in the wrong place. Carefully we searched through the puzzle, taking pieces out and finding their right place. At last it was finished!

Building puzzles has taught me that if you want the beautiful picture at the end of the puzzle, you need to look at each piece from as many angles as possible. You have to move around, turn pieces over in your hand, and look at things from every perspective. And every single time, you need to check under the couch for that one missing piece. This is how to live in a beautiful adventure.

But, I hated being sick at the same time together. I couldn’t take care of April and she couldn’t breathe. Our first adventure of the new decade was to Walgreens to buy Dayquil cold and sinus. It was a cold clear morning, but all I wanted to do was hop back in bed. The next couple of days blurred together. At some point we decided to clean up a bit. Maybe we thought that would make us feel better.

That is when April told me she could not find her wedding ring. I struggled to think of when I had seen it last. It had to have been on the night stand next to her side of the bed. I could see the diamond sparkle next to the wood top, but now it was gone. We cleaned the entire house. We flipped things around. Looked at it from all different angles. We changed our perspectives. It was like the parable Jesus told about the woman who tears apart her home to find a lost coin. But we didn’t find anything. We changed our sheets. Searched under our mattress. Moved the rug under our bed, but It was gone. The only places we had not checked were the insides of the laundry machines and the trash.

April and I pulled out the trash bag from the trash can and started sifting through the snotty tissues. I treated this search like my search for any missing puzzle piece and so halfway through the trash I realized I probably needed to start opening up the tissues to check if the ring was inside. I opened one. Just snot. Another. Snot. On the third, I felt something hard inside. I prayed that it would be her ring. I unfolded the snotty tissue and her ring dropped into my hand.

God has a beautiful adventure for April and me. I want to search for it daily and even go through the trash to find it if I have to. Beauty isn’t always a grand proposal or a free entry into a concert, but sometimes its found looking for diamonds in the dustbin.

Tag: Puzzles

My Heart Matters

Dustbin Diamonds