One Piece Missing

by Mary Keen, M.Div., LMFT

612.332.7743 ext. 220
mkeen@wpc-mpls.org

Periodically "show and tell" is a part of counseling. A client recently brought her "show and tell" collage to a therapy session. The piece was complicated, intricate, colorful, and poignant. Carefully hand written Bible verses were interspersed amongst the cut-from-magazine faces smiling throughout the 14" x 14" collage. "This is the day the Lord has made" boldly spoke next to a faded purple cornflower. To give the piece depth and dimension, bright puzzle pieces were placed orderly and haphazardly across the artwork. She named the art piece "One Piece Missing; Found Won Peace."

After a difficult week of making life work for this client, she sat down to relax and put a puzzle together. After the puzzle picture emerged and merged to completion, one piece was missing. Complete, but not quite. She went to bed that night unsettled by the metaphor of one piece missing. What was meant to be a relaxing time, became unsettling.

The next morning, still perplexed by the missing piece, she took the puzzle apart and began creating the collage. Using pictures from magazines, pieces of construction paper tossed the day before, phrases and photos from church bulletins, and incomplete puzzle pieces, a new picture was born. The new creation was original, unique, and glued with depth and meaning. Far more engaging than the photograph puzzle could ever have been. With the new creation before her, she won her peace. The metaphor of a missing piece became a found peace, as she lives with the assurance of God's presence and Christ's peace and the Holy Spirit's persistence.

Brené Brown's latest book The Gifts of Imperfection talks about the key to whole-hearted living as learning to accept our imperfections and our vulnerabilities. One piece or more can be missing but the whole is not lost. Transforming our imperfections into new creations sometimes just needs a bit of glue, paper, creativity and faith's assurance.