Puzzle Piece

I found myself waking up one night to the thought of puzzles. Actually puzzles was the metaphor for relationships. My roommate told me that his young adults church group is going through a series about relationships, so naturally I thought it would be fun to blog about it.

I find that the image people commonly use to describe their/a relationship is a jigsaw puzzle; it just "fits." Find the perfect puzzle piece and you've found your life partner. I'm questioning that idea. Because what happens when you find someone who looks like that missing puzzle piece?

Hypothetical: You're dating for a few weeks or a few months, and all of the "fun factors" are present:

- someone's reaching out and you're holding hands or arms are around each other
- there's no shortage of texts that come in through the day
- you miss each other, and that fact is communicated
- that rush feeling when you're introduced as the 'girlfriend' or 'boyfriend'
- the look on their face (or maybe just their face is enough) when you see them after being apart

With all these factors, does this mean that the puzzle piece fits together?

I was thinking more about the idea of a jigsaw puzzle. When I start a puzzle, I usually begin with the edges; the corners give a good indication of where the puzzle ends. I look for the colour unification; green with green, blue with blue, etc. What's more fun is that you already know what the puzzle is supposed to look like, so you put certain pieces in a pile, saving them for later.

Imagine completing a jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces are all backwards. You don't have colours to match with, you don't know where the pieces go, you don't even know what the finished puzzle looks like. I wonder if life is like a jigsaw piece. We play on the greyside, so we don't know what the picture is, but we find two pieces that somehow fit together. They may not fit perfectly together, but they fit close enough together. You won't know that it's perfect or not until you see the whole puzzle, in its completion.