Having just finished a knitting contract that had consumed most evenings for the best part of the last four months, I rewarded myself with a new jigsaw. Forty two different teapots segmented into 1000 pieces, with little written captions – my favourite sort of challenge. The pieces were uniquely cut into odd and original shapes. Not your normal run of the mill sort of puzzle, I thought as I ripped off the cellophane and started to sort the pieces.
Horror of horrors! A few days later, when I came to fit in the last piece – it wasn’t there. It was an edge piece, so I’d had my suspicions from the start. I’d kept hope thinking that, because of the unusual cut of the pieces, maybe I had mistaken it for a middle piece in my original ‘sort’ of outside edge pieces and that it would turn up at the end.
Unfortunately it didn’t. I hunted high and low, like the woman in Jesus’ parable of the Lost Coin – under the table, down by the door, into the cupboard, all over the floor – except I didn’t find it. Annoyed, I consoled myself – she had lost a tenth of her coins, the shepherd lost one hundredth of his sheep, I had only lost a thousandth of my puzzle. It was an edge piece – my teapots were intact and unaffected. If I squinted and kept that edge out of my vision, could I imagine it was complete and feel the same whoosh of achievement as if all the pieces had been there? After all, I had spent longer on it if I included the search time, than if all thousand pieces were present.
No, it’s not the same. One piece, even one that appeared insignificant to the big picture, needs to be there. Without it, the whole thing is incomplete.
Are you the missing piece in God’s puzzle of life? Is He waiting for you to come to Him before His plan of salvation is complete? However insignificant you may feel you are, everyone is equally needed as part of His design.