By Jessica Brodie
I love jigsaw puzzles, though I don’t assemble them very often because my three cats also love them … well, they love to demolish them, deviously carrying off the puzzle pieces in their sharp little teeth to devour somewhere private.
Well-made puzzles are great, because the pieces fit together like they’re supposed to. When money was tight, I often bought cheap discount-store puzzles, and those were often missing a piece, or the pieces were hard to line up. Still, a puzzle is a puzzle, usually.
For us puzzle lovers, it’s a glorious feeling when you’ve been searching for just the right piece to fit in a spot. Finally, your fingers locate the piece, and you slide it over, popping it in just so. Perfection!
But sometimes, it’s hard to find that perfect fit. We have a hole in the puzzle, and we search and search for the missing piece. We try to cram one piece in, but it’s not quite right. Maybe it seems right on the surface, but the colors don’t line up, or there’s an extra edge that juts out a tad, making it a poor substitution for the right fit. When we finally find the right piece, ah—just right.
It reminds me of how many of us search desperately for answers, for purpose, for meaning, even for identity. We feel like there’s a hole inside of us, a void, and we fail to realize that we’ve been trying to fill that void with the wrong puzzle piece. Maybe we’re filling it with a romantic partner, a career, a ministry role, or even a child, and nothing fits quite right.
That’s because the only one who can fill that hole is Jesus. He’s the missing puzzle piece to life, the shepherd we’ve been seeking even if some of us don’t know we’ve been searching for him.
And when we find him, what bliss! What joy! The puzzle all comes together, and we see like we’ve never seen before.
We humans struggle along in life. Sometimes we have the best intentions, and we think we’re following God’s path just fine, but we don’t realize we’re veering off-track. We think we’re going to church and reading God’s Word and rolling along famously—then something happens to turn our world upside down and we realize we’ve built our foundation not on the Lord but on slippery, temporary, crumbling human priorities, like wealth or success or even an intact nuclear family, as if those are the pinnacles of eternity. We forget that God is our real family, our real focus, our real priority, and all other things are pale substitutes. We make idols—false gods—out of things that don’t last, forgetting God is the only God of our lives.
God knew this, and perhaps that’s why he put the first commandment first: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3 NIV).
God knew his beloved-but-imperfect children couldn’t find their way to perfection on their own. So he sent his son, Jesus, to pay our sin-debt and provide a path to salvation. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus said in John 14:6.
And as we’re told in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Like a puzzle piece only fits in the proper hole, only Jesus is designed to fill the hole in our lives—the hole that exists in every one of us without him. He’s the only answer, the only fit, the only way, the only one.
But he’s there, ready and waiting, available to everyone who wishes. He provides peace and comfort, true rest, for all who believe.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30.
That yoke is available to us all, no matter what we’ve done or not done.
If you’re struggling today with accepting the peace of Christ, take a breath and remember you already have that missing puzzle piece. Jesus is right there, ready for you to slide him into place.
He is the answer, my friends—the only one.
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