Puzzle Pieces

As I sat down to work on the puzzle, I realized that it had been quite some time since I worked on a 1,000 piece puzzle. I forgot how putting together a puzzle is challenging, fun, frustrating, and how you receive a great sense of accomplishment and excitement when you finally finish it and the entire puzzle is complete, looking exactly like the picture on the box. The beginning was somewhat easy as I put together piles of pieces with the same color scheme that probably fit together. The problem arose when I was towards the end.

Most of the pieces were together, and the end was in sight. Except that I was looking for this one piece and couldn’t find it! I had all the other pieces in that corner together and just that one piece was missing. It shouldn’t be hard to find- after all it should be a light purple like the rest of the pieces, with a little bit of dark blue on one edge and a little bit of red on the other edge. But where was it? I saw pieces that seemed to be the right colors, but did not fit at all, and the pieces that were shaped in a way that looked promising were not the right colors. Maybe there was a malfunction and the puzzle was missing a piece? Maybe I dropped it on the floor?

Of course as I was searching desperately for that puzzle piece, I started thinking about how searching for a puzzle piece is like looking for one’s soulmate. You have certain things that you are looking for in a person, characteristics of that person. With each person suggested the question is, “Do they fit?” Like the puzzle pieces, which were sometimes the right color but not the right size, or the right size, but not the right color, some people have some of the things we are looking for in a spouse, but not others. Where is the person who fits perfectly? Life is not perfect like puzzles, but there is someone who is a close enough fit out there. Where is that person?

Well, I don’t know how my story of searching for a spouse will end up, but I will share with you the end of my puzzle story. Finally, of course, I found the piece. It was not missing; it had not fallen on the floor. The box was not defective, it contained all 1,000 pieces. After working on it and eliminating other pieces by finding where they went, and after searching and searching, I found the puzzle piece! It was that light purple color, but where I thought it should be dark blue, that part of the puzzle gets darker, so it was actually black. And the red ended right before that piece so there was no red. The piece was not the colors that I thought it should be, so I never considered it. You can probably guess where I’m going with this, but the point is that sometimes in life we meet someone who fits just right and they are not what we expected. We thought we were looking for certain characteristics, but in the end someone comes along and fits us perfectly in ways we never considered.

May all those of us who have not yet found our puzzle pieces, find the person who completes us and who we complete, so we can create our beautiful puzzle of life together.