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You know how it is. You settle in to set a puzzle. How do you start? The edge pieces, right?
Well this puzzle, we found out early on that we were missing an edge piece. We hoped maybe we just kept missing it amongst the thousand pieces, and it would show up at some point, but as time went on, that hope dwindled.
As you can see, we never found that last edge piece. Not under cushions or couches or stuck in the box. (Whomever my wife got that puzzle from on BuyNothing is all kinds evil). My wife asked if I felt frustrated or as incomplete as the puzzle itself. I said no – I was satisfied actually. You would think that perhaps I’d be quite upset that upon completing the puzzle that it wasn’t actually complete. But because I knew from the get go that it was likely not going to be complete, I was good with it.
Even though the puzzle was missing a piece, it is because I knew about it from the beginning, that the puzzle went as expected. Is that why we get so frustrated when things don’t go according to plan? Because of our expectations?
There’s this line from Spider-Man: No Way Home where MJ says,
Expect disappointment and you’ll never be disappointed.
When I heard that, I always thought that was such a pessimistic way to look at life. But after doing that puzzle, it makes way more sense.
Not to be pessimistic, but to not expect perfection. We aren’t perfect. We will make mistakes. We will sin. That doesn’t mean we come to peace with sinning and we don’t try to avoid it, because that’s just a slippery slope. But that we don’t constantly beat ourselves up when we do make mistakes.
I know I need to work on having that mentality with my children. Too often, because I have seen and know how wonderful they can be, I set my expectations too high and get frustrated when they make a mistake.
However, it’s a balance. I can’t expect nothing, or expect that they’ll do everything wrong. That would be just as bad.
But I can hope. I can hope that they do things the right way, and know that it might not, so that I can be okay with it.
I can hope that the missing puzzle piece shows up, but I know that it likely won’t.
I can hope not to make mistakes. To not sin. But I know I will, and I know there’s a way that God gave us to make it right.
