Grace and Truth

The puzzle intrigued me. It was a photomosaic puzzle—thousands of tiny photos placed just so to create a picture of a wolf, then cut into 1,000 pieces to be put back together. And it was spread out on a table in the upstairs bedroom at my in-laws’ house. I sat down and worked at it for a bit but could see this puzzle would take hours of work. I couldn’t spend the precious three days we had with my husband’s family holed up by myself working on a puzzle. So down I went to converse with people dear to me.

The next time we visited, months later, there was the puzzle again, out on the table, with perhaps a few more pieces nestled together but a far greater number of pieces waiting to be put in their proper place.

Several years and visits later, I saw the box sitting on a shelf, the puzzle still not completed. When I asked about the puzzle, I learned it had been a gift to my father-in-law. He had never managed to put it together. I asked him if he’d mind if I took it home to work on. He told me he had no hope of ever getting it together and would be delighted if I could finish it. So home it went.

Puzzles often sit out on a table at my house for a week—or a month for a really tough one. This puzzle sat out for close to half a year. It was agonizingly slow work and not much fun. I resorted to using a magnifying glass to search for each piece.

Then came the day I could see I would finally finish this puzzle. I went at it, sure it would be completed by bedtime. But something was wrong, I could see I would have more spaces than pieces. Sure enough, when I’d put in the last piece, there was a small hole. One piece was missing.

“Dad,” I emailed, “I finished the puzzle, but I’m missing a piece. It isn’t here. I’ve searched my house. Do you want to look for it at your house, or do you want me to glue the puzzle together without it?”

He responded that many of us go through life with missing pieces. He thought his own individual puzzle might be 75 percent missing. The puzzle was a mere .001 incomplete. How happy his wife would be if he could live at such a level of thoughtfulness and thoroughness. He ended his response with, “Glue that wonderful work of grace together and rejoice greatly.”

How my father-in-law made me laugh! I thought about how Paul writes in Colossians of Jesus making us complete: “Don’t let anyone lead you astray with empty philosophy and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the evil powers of this world, and not from Christ. For in Christ the fullness of God lives in a human body, and you are complete through your union with Christ. He is the Lord over every ruler and authority in the universe” (Colossians 2:8-10 NLT).

St. Augustine put it this way, “Our souls are restless until they find their rest in You.” Without Christ, we rest less. There is always something missing, and we are on the move, looking for something to fill the void. We may even find something to fill the void temporarily, but soon we are on the move, searching again, for only Christ completes us. Jesus is the missing piece that fits perfectly. In Jesus we can rest because Jesus completes us, uniting us with God. As Christians we can rejoice because through the work of Jesus, God, in grace, glues us together. This is true, both individually and as the church, the body of Christ. Jesus unites us and glues us together, placing all the individual pieces of our lives just so to create a beautiful picture.

“Glue that wonderful work of grace together and rejoice greatly.”

Donna Mast is co-pastor of Scottdale (Pa.) Mennonite Church.