Create Something Great From What You’ve Been Given 5-Day Reading PlanSample

Missing LEGOs

My son and I didn’t have it all together. Of the seventy-five pieces that made up the LEGO City Desert Rally Racer, we had only seventy-three.

We spent a few minutes crawling around on the floor with our faces pushed halfway into the carpet, scanning the terrain for anomalies in search of the two missing bricks. We checked our pockets and the folds in our clothes. Nothing. 

So, Asa (then six years old) boxed up the pieces we did have, pushed his little hands into his pajama pants pockets, and walked to the window to sulk. Because if you’re going to sulk, doing it while staring out a window is the poetically correct way to go about it.

I handed him water. He took a drink and said, “Now we’ll never finish it.”

As much as I mean to paint that picture comedically, I was also learning a bit of wisdom: to give sadness and disappointment a moment when they show up. When I don’t do that or when I just press on through sadness and disappointment, they tend to stick around and ruin better moments. When I give myself a moment to be sad and disappointed, I can actually move on.

So, sulk we did. As I stared out the window, I thought about how much fun Asa and I had building together. I remembered that, most of the time, we weren’t building from a kit; we were just grabbing pieces and assembling from scratch and memory and imagination. 

I turned away from the window and started running my fingers through a pile of older LEGO pieces.

Asa knelt beside me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna finish this thing.”

He sifted through bricks with me. We found pieces that weren’t perfect but would work. Pieces we had on hand.

We tinkered and built and laughed and disassembled and talked. . . and when we finished, it didn’t look much at all like the picture on the box. We hadn’t built the LEGO City Desert Rally Racer. We’d created the McRoberts Household Truck-ish Spaceship Thing. It was perfect just as it was. Well, actually, it was not at all perfect. It was something better than perfect; it was something we loved.

Jesus made some truly remarkable things happen by using whatever he had on hand. He made wine from water. Used dirt and spit to restore a guy’s vision. Fed thousands with a kid’s Doritos and sandwich.

Jesus first took notice of what he had on hand and decided it was plenty to work with. 

With the hungry crowd surrounding him, he then looked at the sack lunch a disciple had lifted off the one kid who brought a snack that day and said, “Thank God. We’ve got this.”

We had seventy-three bricks from the box, instructions, and the extras on hand. That’s a lot to work with. The first time my son and I finished a LEGO kit together it looked exactly like the picture. We were on cloud nine. But the McRoberts Household Truck-ish Spaceship Thing was something far more special than one that looks like the picture on the box. It reflected my son and me.

How many projects, dreams, or relationships existed in some form of disarray until you took a moment to be disappointed and then looked to see what you had on hand and started to tinker . . .and build and laugh and disassemble and talk and eventually become the kind of person who makes the things you want to make—the kinds of things God created you to make?

Respond

1. Describe a time when God used pieces that weren’t meant to work together to create something new in your life or the life of another?
2. What are you experiencing today that seems out of place or feels as if a piece is missing?
3. Ask Jesus to create something in your life that only He can and then share your story with others.