Purchasing a used puzzle can create a problem. Usually all the pieces are there, but sometimes …

You know how it goes. You have put the puzzle all together, but it’s time to put it away. You take it all apart and carefully put the pieces back in the box. You don’t notice that you dropped a piece, but the cat does. She bats it around because that’s what cats do. It ends up under the couch, which nobody will notice until it’s moving time.

When you move to a smaller house, you don’t have room for all your puzzles. You pick out your favorites and take the rest to the thrift shop. One of them is that puzzle with a piece under the couch, which you have not yet moved.

Somebody buys it. At home, they put the box on a card table (does anyone have those now?) and begin with the edge pieces. The whole family works on the puzzle, chattering, laughing, and trying to squish pieces where they don’t fit.

Eventually everyone starts looking under the card table, in the box, and even under the couch, but it’s the wrong couch, and they don’t have a cat. Mother, father, son, and daughter stare at the puzzle. It would have been beautiful, mountains with trees and squirrels and birds and blue sky, but …

Sadly, they put the pieces back in the box and mark it, “One piece missing.” What do you do with the box? Do you put it in the trash? On a top shelf in the back? Take it back with its label? Without the label?

* * *

God has created a beautiful world: mountains with trees and squirrels and birds and blue sky, plains with antelope and rabbits and grass and blue sky, oceans with dolphins and coral and islands and blue sky, summer and fall and winter and spring. Then God put us in charge.

Some of us live in the mountains, some in the plains, some near the oceans, some with four seasons and some with only two (wet and dry) and others with only one. Some of us stay put all our lives, and others move around from one place to another.

But all of us are puzzle pieces with a responsibility to where we live and who we live with. Some of us accept that responsibility and keep our responsibility to both the land and our neighbors (wherever they live). A few ignore their responsibility, leaving gaps in God’s puzzle of creation.

What will we do to make creation’s puzzle whole?

Or what will God do with the rest of creation’s puzzle?