Spiritual Reflection

Have you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle?  My brother and I did this as kids when we visited Grandma.  All of us worked together and it was fun to see it finished.  With the snow in Kansas when I visited my brother last week, we had the time to put together a puzzle of a picture of my favorite city…Chicago.  There were 1000 pieces and it took a few days to finish it.  But take a closer look at the picture (right around the clock) and you will see that there is a piece missing.  The box should have said this was a 999 piece puzzle.  You guessed it; it took way too much time looking for that one piece.

You really don’t need that piece to appreciate the picture.  As a matter of fact there are 999 reasons to be happy that the picture is “almost” finished.  Often it is too easy to be bothered by one little missing piece of life and forget to enjoy the “rest of the story”.  The puzzle will remind me to look at the whole picture because nothing is really perfect and it would be better to focus on the good anyway and not on what is missing.  The gospel in today’s liturgy showed how the Apostles were so concerned about crossing the sea in a storm that they forgot to be full of joy at the miracle Jesus had just done in the multiplication of the loaves and fish.

Don’t spend too much time looking for a missing piece!