The Missing Piece

The Missing Piece 

            Jack is four and loves to work on puzzles. He is very good at it. But then he is my grandson and from my view point, does everything well. I think he is going to be an engineer some day. Or maybe a preacher like his great grandpa, because in addition to being smart he is also very passionate and recently told me he asked Jesus to come into his heart.

            I love people who are passionate about life and important things in it. You have met them, I am sure. If you can get their passions focused on the right things, they can do amazing things.

            Jack is passionate about puzzles. When he starts one, he doesn’t want to stop until it is finished. The other day when he was at my house, he and I were working on a wooden puzzle of the United States that happens to be just about as old as his mother. I told him I didn’t think all of the pieces were there but he didn’t seem to mind.

            Jack and I have looked at maps before. It is one of my favorite things to do and I have shared that with him. He knows that his cousins live in Indiana and his momma’s friend lives in South Carolina. And he knows he lives in Ohio and in the United States of America.

            So together, Jack and I started to work on that old puzzle. He was able to do the outside states without much help from me. Then we started on the western states. That was more difficult, even for Gramma.  All of those states with fields of grain look the same to me.

When we had used all of the pieces, we still had four holes in the puzzle.

            “Which states are missing Gramma?”

            “Let’s see, we don’t have Arizona, Alabama, Vermont and Ohio.”

            “OHIO? Oh no Gramma that is where we live, we have to find Ohio!”

            “Jack, I told you some of the pieces were gone, they were lost a long time ago.”

            “But Ohio is where I live.” He didn’t seem to care about the other three states, but the fact that the state where he lives was missing, was distressing to him.

            Later that afternoon when his Mom came to get him he was still upset, the first thing he told her was that Ohio was missing from the puzzle. 

            My life is like a puzzle with the some of the pieces missing. I don’t like it very much when the small insignificant pieces come up missing. Those pieces are the weeks when money doesn’t stretch like it should, or the clean floor gets dirty.  But when the piece right in the middle of my life that represents God's will for my life gets lost, it causes me a great deal of distress.  

            Unlike Ohio that will probably be forever lost, (although it could be at the  bottom of the toy chest) God's will for our lives can usually be located in the mess that we sometime make of our lives. That’s all we have to do is call His name and ask Him to show us the way back to Him.

            If you are feeling a void in your life today, if it feels like there is a big piece of the puzzle of your life that is missing today, perhaps it is because you have lost God out of your life. Fortunately, unlike the Ohio puzzle piece, He can be found.