Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

• Isaiah 6:4-8

The word of the Lord came to me, saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
    before you were born I set you apart;
    I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
“Alas, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”
But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.

• Jeremiah 1:4-8

To most people who look at the photo, they see a picture that reminds them of a Christmas tradition. The tradition: watching the first of the annual holiday specials.  There are so many today, but the Charlie Brown Christmas started the entire thing.  The network that first aired it thought it would be a one and done event.  Charles Schultz was very demanding, trying to preserve the character of the characters.  There would be Scripture recited by Linus.  There would not be a laugh track.  You tell the audience that they are stupid when you instruct them to laugh.  If it was not that funny, they shouldn’t laugh.  And the actors had to be children.  As it turned out, many of them could not read and they had to parrot back what the person just read to them and the audio guy had to splice the pieces together.  And no one was an established child actor.  They went to schools and held auditions.

In the puzzle pictured above, there are errors.  It was after the first airing of the Christmas special that the doghouse became red.  It is blue in the original thirty-minute show.  They had no idea since the cartoon strip was in black and white in the papers.  And when they sang Hark! The Hearld Angels Sing, they sang from memory, without song books.  And Peppermint Patty and Marcie were not part of the Peanuts gang yet.

But as I started to unpackage this puzzle, thinking the puzzle would take about five days, working intermittently as I rested away from my writing.  Then I started sorting pieces, and there was a hill of black pieces for the night sky and a mountain of white pieces of snow.

I started singing Flowers on the Wall by the Statler Brothers.  I had no idea why, but the chorus is as follows:

Countin’ flowers on the wall
That don’t bother me at all
Playin’ solitaire ’til dawn with a deck of 51
Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kangaroo
Now don’t tell me, I’ve nothin’ to do

• Lewis Dewitt, Flowers on the Wall (Chorus only)

Note: I do not smoke and I do not wish for anyone to pick up that bad habit or the modern concept of vaping.  It’s just in the lyrics.  But here are the Statler Brothers singing Flowers on the Wall.

About day three, it hit me why I had that earworm for three days.  Since a third of the pieces of the puzzle were solid white and no distinguishing marks, I could have already lost a few white pieces to the kitchen floor.  With my bad eyesight and the poor lighting in the kitchen, I might never find them.  I might pull out my hair looking for a piece that simply was not there anymore.

Note: The line about playing solitaire til dawn with a deck of 51.  Solitaire decks have 52 cards.  With 51 cards, you could play forever and never win.  But if I had a piece missing, it would be like playing with a deck of 51, a losing proposition.

To make matters worse, the very next day, I was convinced that I had white and black transition pieces that were missing.  The snowman was not going together.  Shermy’s hair was missing a piece.  I think it’s Shermy.  If it were Pig Pen, there would be a cloud of dust, even in the snow.  His hair, spiked, would be more sparce and not as uniform in length and direction.  You might disagree…  And the tree that supported Woodstock’s nest was missing pieces.  I had missing pieces everywhere!

But I had put pieces in the wrong place.  They fit, but they were not supposed to fit where I put them.  In the photo above, I still had not found my error with the snowman.  But with the earworm, and then legitimately unable to find the piece that fit, since the piece that fit was already stuck somewhere else…  I was driving myself crazy.

Note: I always do the border first, but with half the pieces fitting the other half and nothing but white or black borders, I opted to start in the middle and work out, for the first time in my life doing it that way.  This picture was taken on day seven, I think, and I thought I would be done in five days.  Ha!

Christmas puzzles were a tradition in our house.  With two rambunctious boys. It calmed them down and they took the challenge seriously.  It brought sanity to the month of December until we got near the end and there was always a piece missing.  One son, always the same one, would reach in his pocket and pull out the piece, claiming he had just found it on the floor.  He would put the piece in place and announce to everyone the HE had completed the puzzle.  I think his brother and I were both thinking the same thing – “Would we get caught if we buried the body deep enough?”  Of course, we thought it, but we did not do it.

My wife was the renegade in the puzzle tradition.  When she got tired, she would pick up a piece and say, “I know where this piece fits, and with a little work with my scissors, it is going to fit.”  The boys would fight to get the piece from her and help her leave the room, which was her goal all along.

But whether it is a jigsaw puzzle or some other project in life, have you ever had the pieces in the wrong place, and the other pieces just do not fit?

Or have you been asked to be part of a “puzzle” project and you gave a Jeremiah excuse rather than an Isaiah acceptance?  And you became the missing piece?  Did the project fail because you made an excuse?

God calls us to do some crazy things.  When this comes out, I will have published over 4600 posts, and I had a lot of excuses before I got started.

God uses us in mysterious ways at times.

Please, don’t be the missing piece.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.