the Week of Christ the King / Proper 29 / Ordinary 34
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Daily Devotionals
Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life
I recently took over our dining room table. It is now covered with a thousand pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle, a rather beautiful montage of lighthouse illustrations and facts, was given me by a family at the Berea Christian Church across from the Kentucky Horsepark here in the heart of the Bluegrass. I have just now gotten it out to assemble it as a result of some cleaning my wife did. She found it.
I have been collecting lighthouses for some time now and the puzzle has a number of the lighthouses I have in my collection illustrated within it. The border is a row of boxed frames with lighthouses in them and the center has open areas with rather large illustrations and ovals which contain smaller ones. The larger illustrations are of the more well known lights such as Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and West Quoddy in Lubec, Maine.
Of course, the border was the easy part to pick out and assemble. And the larger lights are the easier of those in the center of the puzzle. But none of them would be easy were it not for the top of the box. The top of the box carries the photograph of the illustrations from which the puzzle was printed. Without the top of the box I would have no idea where certain lighthouses were located in the illustration nor how they went together.
Some I would know due to being a collector and having some of the models as well as prints and pictures. But the top of the box is the guide. Without it I would assemble what I could and then, probably, eventually quit. Life in Christ is that way. All the pieces of life are there for us to assemble, but there is a perfect picture; Christ Himself. We can try to put the pieces together without looking to Jesus, but we would eventually quit.
"We should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness by which they lie in wait to deceive; but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head, Christ." Ephesians 4:14, 15 Simple put, Christ is the top of the box. He is what we are to look like when we finally get done with life.
'Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life' Copyright 2010 © Tom Kelley. 'Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life' articles may be reproduced in whole under the following provisions: 1) A proper credit must be given to the author at the end of each story, along with their complete bio and a link to https://www.studylight.org/ 2) 'Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life' content may not be arranged or "mirrored" as a competitive online service.
