Missing Pieces

For the church’s rummage sale, one item we brought to sell was an almost-new, very complicated, 1,000-piece puzzle depicting colorful frogs on a beautiful background of green vegetation. To assure the prospective buyer that this puzzle was a quality buy, we attached a note: “All pieces are here.”

While cleaning up following the holiday activity, we found an errant piece. Quietly embarrassed regarding our unwitting misrepresentation, and since we had no idea who bought the puzzle, we put the piece in a transparent sandwich bag and tacked it to the church’s bulletin board so that someone who knew the buyer would add this piece to the puzzle (so to speak).

I thought about the buyer who would spend a great deal of time and effort putting together the puzzle, only to be disappointed and perhaps frustrated when noticing that a piece was missing. The buyer (like most of us) would concentrate on the missing piece to the extent of negatively affecting his or her enjoyment of a puzzle that was 99.9 percent complete.

This got me thinking about many Thanksgiving family visits across the miles: Sometimes my relatives would concentrate on the child who could not make the trip without realizing how those comments affected the three other children who did make the trip.

Then I thought further about my own disappointments in life and how often they gave way to appreciation — the few promises broken and the many promises kept, the few relationships gone awry and the many fine relationships well-maintained, the few prayers seemingly not answered and the many prayers answered.

— Tom Colosi