Finding Jesus in Your Broken Pieces

Have you ever felt like life is a thousand-piece puzzle and nobody gave you the box top?

You have got the pieces. That is all. You hold up a blue one and wonder whether it is the sky or the lake. A green one — a tree, or somebody's shirt.

It is worse when it is your actual life. The business you dedicated to the Lord that went bankrupt anyway. The vows you made in front of God and your family that did not hold. The child you raised right who is a thousand miles from God today. The diagnosis. The thing at work. The battle in your own head that nobody sees.

And you pray: God, you said you work all things together for good. So how does this piece fit?

That is the road to Emmaus. Two men walking away from Jerusalem with everything they hoped for buried on Friday. Was he not the one who was going to deliver us? Did he not walk on water and give sight to the blind and raise the dead?

Look at what verse 17 says they were doing: talking with each other about all these things. They were not silent. They were processing it out loud, together, and still walking the wrong direction.

So do not mistake talking about it for understanding it, and do not mistake confusion for abandonment. He is already walking with them in verse 15, before anybody recognises anything.

Which piece are you holding today that makes no sense? Name it plainly — and notice you are not walking alone with it, even if it does not feel like company.

Driving home along the MacArthur Causeway, James watched a low-flying aircraft rocking its wings, then nosing over. No floats. No wheels coming down. And it went down, down, down.

You are on a bridge. You cannot stop. Three miles to the next exit. They called 911, got bounced from dispatcher to dispatcher, and finally reached Miami Beach — and the man on the line said, oh, right where the seaplane lands.

It was an experimental aircraft. No pontoons, no wheels, a flat bottom like a fishing boat, propellers up high. It lands on the water on purpose.

He is happy to report there was no plane crash in Miami that Saturday.

Everything he saw was real. The wings did rock. It did descend toward the water. Every observation was accurate, and the conclusion was completely wrong — because he was watching from a bridge, at speed, with no way to see the whole thing.

That is today's verse, and it is not a platitude. My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. That is not God being evasive. It is God saying: your vantage point is a bridge.

This does not mean your pain is imaginary or that everything happening to you is secretly fine. It means the interpretation you have settled on may be a seaplane.

What have you already concluded about your situation? Hold it a little more loosely today, and ask him for the part you cannot see from where you are standing.

Are you the only person in Jerusalem who does not know what happened? That is what they say to him. And the irony of the whole story is that he is the only one who does know.

He does not correct them. He could have said: funny you should mention it — I was ditched by the men who swore they had my back and left hanging out to dry. He says none of it. He listens, and he lets them get it out.

When Jesus asks a question in Scripture, it is almost never because he needs the answer. It is because we do.

Now look at verse 21, and at three words in it. We had hoped.

Past tense. All of it in the past tense.

A lot of us are living in that tense and have not said so out loud. There was a time you were sure God was good and working all things for good. He has quietly stopped being your living hope and become your past hope. You still believe he can. You are no longer sure he will.

Notice that Jesus does not scold them for it, and he does not leave. He walks the rest of the road with two men whose faith is in the past tense, and he is the one who opens the conversation.

So say it honestly today, because he is not fragile and he already knows. Where has your hope moved into the past tense? Write the sentence out: I had hoped that ______. Then keep walking, because he has not gone anywhere.

Here is what Jesus does not do. He does not say, look — it is me.

He opens the Bible. Moses, the Psalms, the Prophets. He shows them that like a scarlet thread through the whole thing, every story had been whispering his name, and that the Christ had to suffer these things and then enter his glory.

Seven miles of that, and nobody wrote it down.

Maybe he went to Psalm 22 — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me — the words he had shouted from the cross. Maybe Isaiah 53: he was pierced for our transgressions, and by his wounds we are healed. Maybe Micah 5:2, naming Bethlehem like a postal address centuries early.

Maybe he went to Numbers 21, where God tells Moses to put a bronze snake on a pole so that anyone who looks at it lives — which, at the time, had to feel like a piece with no picture. Lord, did you not just say no idols? Did you not come down hard on Aaron for exactly this?

And then John 3, one verse before the most quoted line in the English language: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

There it is. The Old Testament hands you pieces. Christ is the box top.

Which means the answer to your confusion is not a new piece of information about your circumstances. It is a person you already have access to.

Open the book today and read something you have read before, looking for him in it. What did you see that you had walked past?

They beg him to stay. They sit down — and the guest becomes the host. He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them.

The last time these men saw those hands do that, it was the night before the cross. The hands pierced on Friday are breaking bread on Sunday.

Their eyes open. And he vanishes.

That is a strange gift, when you think about it. He gives them recognition and then removes his physical presence in the same breath. What he leaves them with is a question they ask each other: did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?

And then verse 33, which is the part that gets skipped. That same hour they rose and returned to Jerusalem.

Seven miles. In the dark. Two men who had trudged out that afternoon with their shoulders down ran all the way back the same night, because they had to tell somebody. Nobody assigned it to them. Nobody trained them. Lovers tell — that is all evangelism has ever been.

Hearts on fire get feet moving. And a heart that is not moving anything is worth asking about honestly, without shame, because it happens to everyone at some point.

You may still be holding a fistful of pieces that make no sense, and nobody can hand you the answer to your particular situation. You can be handed the box top, and his name is Jesus.

So when you open this book, does your heart still burn — or has it gone quiet? And who would you run seven miles to tell?