The other day, for no particular reason, I started working on a puzzle. I was at a family party and my brother-in-law had 3D-printed one for a nephew — just for fun. The interesting thing about this puzzle: it's completely encased. You can't see where or how to open it. All you can do is twist and turn until it releases, level by level.
The first five levels are easy. You twist, feel an opening, and it releases to the next stage. Levels six and seven seem just as easy at first — but that's when everything else gets in the way. Conversations, music, kids running around. And then, almost without noticing, thirty or forty minutes had passed and I still hadn't gotten past level seven.
"I don't care, it's just a dumb puzzle," I thought. But I didn't quit out of frustration. I was about to quit out of something worse — lack of effort, lack of thinking."
Just as I was about to put it down, my brother-in-law walked over. "Looks like you're stuck."
"Yeah," I said. "I've been stuck here for a minute. I even went back to levels six and five — sometimes in a maze, you took a wrong turn somewhere." Still couldn't get past level seven.
That's when it hit me. I wasn't just a few steps behind. I was going to have to start from the very beginning.
That's the thing nobody wants to do. The inevitable reset. But I've been here before — very recently, in a different area of my life. So I asked him, almost already knowing: "I'm going to have to go all the way back, huh?"
He built the puzzle. He already knew the answer. A simple — almost proud — "Yup." Proud because the puzzle he designed had beaten me. For me, it was something more. It was an answer to a question I'd asked God earlier that morning.
But here's what I want you to understand — God wasn't telling me to give up. He wasn't telling me to go backward and stay there. The moment I started the puzzle again from the beginning, everything changed. I moved through it with speed. With confidence. I knew what I was doing now. I finished that puzzle quickly.
That was the message: you know what you're doing now.
Going back wasn't a failure. Going back was the foundation I didn't have the first time.