How did I create the
Jeremiah Puzzle?

I am not a psychologist nor have I ever worked with jigsaw puzzles. However, the idea for this puzzle and all the details still came to me in the middle of the night. At that time, my daughter Robyn, who was 14 years-old, was having serious emotional issues with self-identity, self-worth, love, abandonment, and bullying. I wanted to find a way to show her in a visual and tangible way that God really does exist, that He has already been very active in her life so far, and she can trust what He says about her far more than what the world, friends, bullies, the Internet etc. have to say.

 

One night at about 2 a.m., I had some very vivid ideas running through my head about something that could help. I wasn’t able to sleep until I had written all the details down on a notepad that I had beside my bed. The idea was to portray life as a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle pieces were to be blank initially but, together, we would write all the significant events in her life onto the individual pieces. We would then put the pieces together in a way that showed the interconnections leading to how she eventually ended up in such a desperate place. This would not only take the feeling of randomness and lack of control out of her situation, but it would also show her where God had already been involved in her life up to that point. I felt that if she could actually see that God had been there all along, then she would also see that she wouldn’t have to go through life on her own in the future. This was an answer to my longing to help her cope with life in a way that puts the focus on God – and not on the circumstances. The next day I set about creating a working model of that idea. I even “thought” of a remarkable name for that idea: The “Jeremiah Puzzle – The puzzle of your life”.

 

I created this jigsaw puzzle to help Robyn. However, I also showed the idea to my family, some friends as well as some Christian and non-Christian psychologists and counsellors. My family and friends were all very excited by what they saw because they could see that it would be something for more people than just my daughter Robyn. They saw that it would be great for everybody as a fun family project for recording memories and events and for building faith because the puzzle shows where God has already been active in people’s lives. The psychologists and counsellors who I showed it to were very excited about it because they saw that it could be used to help in their counselling work. It would be a very effective tool to get their clients engaged in identifying key events in their lives and also for developing therapy plans. It enables counsellors to work together with their clients in a fun, tangible and visual way to identify those “puzzle pieces” that contributed to their emotional problems and why they ended up needing therapy. In addition, Christian counsellors could use the puzzle to show that God really exists and is already very involved in their clients’ lives. This might be a game changer for many struggling youth and adults because it brings God into the equation when developing therapy plans.