Last week, our son was putting together a puzzle on the living room floor. The borrowed puzzle was made up of 25 oversized pieces, and this was his first time to assemble it. I was so proud of how he worked diligently, telling us each time we tried to help him that he could do it himself. Over time the picture of a farmer sitting on a tractor came into focus. My son fit the 24th piece in where it belonged. But when he reached for the 25th piece, the final setion of the puzzle, it was nowehere to be found. We checked the box. We looked under the couch. It must have been missing when we borrowed it. How frustrating!
Our son immediately forgot about the picture he had put together, all the work he'd put into those 24 pieces. All he wanted to know for the next hour was, "Where's the other piece?" He didn't notice that the missing piece was really pretty inconsequential, just a piece of sky. We could all see what we were supposed to: the farmer on the tractor. But he didn't care about what he could see; he only cared about what was missing.I don't know about you, but sometimes I find that in my life of faith, I am kind of like my son with that puzzle. I strive to have an examined faith, a faith that takes into account the difficulties and suffering inherent in life. But sometimes I take it too far. I ask so may questions that I slip past the healthy humility of "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief" (Mark 9:24) to just plain doubt.
While it is essential to admit that we don't have a full understanding of God (even the Apostle Paul admits that in 1 Corinthians 13), sometimes we focus so much on the missing piece that we fail to see the pieces that are there, the picture that has been laid out before us. The questions cease to act as a healthy corrective to the false sense of absolute certainty and begin to disrupt the pieces that are there. Soon we're not just missing one piece, but we've given up and just put the whole thing back in the box and on the shelf.
One time a crowd asked Jesus, "What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do" (John 6:30)? It seems like a reasonable request until you realize that this is the same crowd that had been present the day before when Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 of them with a couple of fish and five loaves of bread. Of course they had questions; who doesn't? But talk about focusing on the missing piece when there's a wonderful picture right there in front of you!
As Paul writes, until we see God "face to face" there
will be questions, and a healthy faith admits that. Sometimes, however, we just have to say, "I sure wish I had that missing piece, but, wow, look at the picture I can see!" After all, having faith does eventually at some point require having some, well, faith.
