Psalm 18

Have you seen the 1996 film Jerry Maguire? There’s a scene from that film that had most women swooning and most men rolling their eyes. It’s where the character played by Tom Cruise looks at his estranged wife, played by Renee Zellweger, and tearfully says, “You…complete…me.” That’s what I thought about when I read today’s psalm in The Message. It rendered verse 20 this way: “God made my life complete when I placed all the pieces before him.”

I must confess that I didn’t feel the urge to swoon or roll my eyes at the thought of God completing me by taking the pieces of my life and putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Rather, I felt something more akin to awe.

Allow me to share with you one of my favorite quotes from the great classic, Desire of Ages:

“By His life and His death, Christ has achieved even more than recovery from the ruin wrought through sin. It was Satan’s purpose to bring about an eternal separation between God and man; but in Christ we become more closely united to God than if we had never fallen. In taking our nature, the Saviour has bound Himself to humanity by a tie that is never to be broken. Through the eternal ages He is linked with us.”

When I first read that, I knew immediately that it was true. Satan wants us to be separated from God forever. That’s a problem, you know. Sin rearing its ugly head in God’s universe—what could be a bigger problem than that? Yet the way God has dealt with the sin problem has ended with us closer to God than before. That means that, somehow, God will bring us out on the other side of sin better than we would have been if sin had never entered the universe in the first place.

How in the world does He do that?!

How can He take something awful and not only turn it into a blessing, but turn it into a bigger and better blessing than we could have received if we hadn’t been subjected to the awful thing in the first place? That boggles my mind. Again and again.

So there’s no doubt in my mind that David is correct when he says that God can make our lives complete when we place all the pieces before Him. It doesn’t matter what the pieces look like. It doesn’t matter if they’re seriously warped. It doesn’t matter if some are missing. It doesn’t matter if they look like they’ll never fit together.

God has a beautiful way of making them all fit together. And the way He fits the pieces of our lives together makes the end result more amazing than it could ever have been if the puzzle had never been fragmented. God is a genius that way. No matter the circumstances, He can make us complete.