The Missing Piece

When my daughter Chelsea was young we enjoyed going to garage sales together. They were like treasure hunts to us; we never knew what unique item or great deal would be unearthed with each stop.

When Chelsea was of preschool age she would scour every sale in search of board puzzles, thoroughly scrutinizing each one to make sure all the pieces were accounted for. She loved putting them together and would spend hours at it. As soon as she finished one, she would flip it over and assemble it again, thrilled each time her picture was complete.

Before long she wanted more of a challenge and she quickly graduated to several-hundred-piece puzzles. As a teenager, she enjoyed displaying her completed masterpieces on her bedroom walls.

But one garage sale gamble of a large, 500 piece puzzle, did not pay off. After several days of laboring over it, just as Chelsea was putting the last few pieces into place, she realized it was one piece short.

“Oh, no. I have to throw it away, Mom,” she lamented. “It’s missing a piece.”

I felt bad for her and quickly suggested that we search for it. We looked all over her room, on the floor, under her bed, and even inside her closet. The search, however, proved futile.

“I wonder if we could make a fake piece to fit in its place?” I offered, knowing when I said it that it wouldn’t work, but wanting desperately to help.
Finally, I begrudgingly assisted Chelsea in throwing it away.

Later that evening I began to ponder the similarities of how each one of us is just like that puzzle; each of us are incomplete, too. God purposely creates in us an emptiness in our lives that can only be filled by a relationship with Jesus. While many of us attempt to fill that void in our life by “making a fake piece” through indulging in outward pleasures, God’s word tells us that we will not have inner peace until we make peace with His Son. When we sincerely ask Jesus to forgive us of our sins and come into our heart to live, He fills the void inside of us, causing our hearts to overflow with love and joy, and especially …peace.

Jesus completes the picture between God’s holiness and man’s sinful state. Jesus is the perfect fit.