Puzzled

A few days ago I found a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in the back of a closet. It’s probably been there for 30 years. When our family was young, assembling the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle was a summer tradition. A card table with all the puzzle pieces (face-up) sat off in a corner of our home and became the go-to place when there was a rainy spell or an overabundance of mosquitoes outside.

The picture on the box in the closet was of superstars Larry Byrd and Magic Johnson leaping high in the air reaching for a basketball.

As we neared the completion of a jigsaw puzzle, late in August, our collective family excitement would rise. Occasionally, one of us would be found alone at the card table trying to sneak a few pieces into place in an effort to finish the puzzle. But this was discouraged. Jigsaw puzzles were considered a group effort.

I remember the Byrd/Johnson puzzle because, when we reached the end, we were short four pieces. Four exactly! This meant four gaping, impossible-to-ignore holes. Until those missing pieces were found, the puzzle remained merely a puzzle, not the picture promised on the face of the box.

Let me restate my point. 996 pieces do not make a picture when you need 1,000.

We searched the floor around the table. Then we rechecked the box. Finally we began to blame the puzzle company for producing a defective product.

The Bible’s description of the basic human condition is similar to that incomplete puzzle. We—all of us—are people who were meant to be like a magnificent picture on the face of a box. But something bad happened, and we became puzzles with missing pieces and lots of holes.

Should I have trained as a scholar-theologian, I think I would have spent most of my lifetime exploring the first three chapters of Genesis to understand more fully how we got this way. I have always wondered what remains to be disclosed in those words that describe creation events and the beginnings of human life (and relationship). What was life like before the great catastrophe described in Genesis 3 where everything came apart?

When man devolved from picture to puzzle there was a terrible separation between heaven and earth, between the Maker and the made. Ultimately it resulted in a search that is really the story of the rest of the Bible. When the first man was found, his explanation was pitiful. “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” The words are an executive summary of humanity’s enduring problem from that moment until now. Let me put it in other words: I didn’t want to be found because I have become like a puzzle with missing pieces.

Throughout my life there have been moments when I looked at myself and felt as if there were more pieces of me missing than pieces in their proper places. How much energy has been expended compensating, explaining, finding excuses for those absent pieces. And how much time has been spent repairing the consequences of things I’ve done because pieces were missing. Eugene O’Neill, who would not necessarily be numbered among Christian thinkers, describes my (and our) plight well in these words: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”

While most of us like to be gracious to ourselves over the problem of missing pieces, we are often not as charitable toward others with similar struggles. Jesus, using another word picture, spoke of the ease in spotting a speck in another’s eye while ignoring the log in our own.

In my own long journey through life, I have found, with God’s help, missing pieces of myself from time to time. On more than a few of those occasions, there was invaluable assistance from members of my personal community: a loving spouse, gentle friends, nagging critics, even enemies. Lacking such a community, one is destined to reach the end of life never knowing just how many missing pieces there actually are. Most missing-piece work is done in concert with others.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, there is a moment when Elizabeth Benet is confronted by a suitor, Charles D’Arcy, whom she’d often treated with disdain and condescension. His blunt words have forced her, for apparently the first time, to face her own missing pieces.

Of that moment, Elizabeth Benet says, “How despicably have I acted! I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! Who have often disdained the generous candor of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blamable distrust. How humiliating is this discovery! Yet how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly … until this moment I never knew myself.” (Italics mine.)

One of the most remarkable evidences of St. Paul’s conversion to the saving way of Jesus Christ—in my opinion—was his blunt recognition of his own missing pieces. Up until, let’s say, the age of 34, he’d been trained to live as if there was nothing missing in his life. “Touching the law, blameless …” is his original assessment of himself. He was a Jew, a Pharisee, a zealot. What more could anyone be?

Then there is this humbling moment in which he faces the fact of his missing pieces. “I was a violent, blaspheming, persecuting man,” he recalls. Again, he writes, “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”

Perhaps the Christian journey could be said to break into three parts. One, the moment I acknowledge that I am more a puzzle than a picture, lacking many necessary pieces. Two, the process of remaking wherein many of the pieces are recovered and pressed into place. Call this the pursuit of godliness. And three, that great “day of Christ,” when the puzzle is completed. Of that grand moment Paul writes: “We eagerly await a Savior … the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”

How valuable the friend or spouse who loves us enough to say occasionally, “There’s a piece missing in you today.” How gracious the friend or spouse who also loves us—as did Jesus—as a picture-in-the-making. How kind the redeeming God of the Bible who intends to “re-complete” us so that one day we shall no longer be a puzzle but a splendid, perfected, glorious being made in his image. No missing pieces.

That Byrd/Johnson puzzle? There came a moment when one of us—not to be named—confessed to secreting one of the missing pieces so that they could be the one to finish the puzzle. There followed two others who sheepishly admitted to the same intention. This left one missing piece …which was in my pocket. You must never tell anyone I told you this.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives in New Hampshire.