Puzzle Pieces

"All you need is love"
We sing out from soapbox street corners and family dinner tables
Be kind, be hopeful, but above all else, be loving
We say with our mouths full of clouded truths and misty misinterpretations
How can we know of love when all we're offered is dozens of roses
and movie scripts of first kisses in the rain?

Like a painter with stained hands
You kept Your wounds as signs of Your artwork and of Your great love
Wearing humanity and walking the earth to be nailed on a tree
with enough branches to shade all of Your children with mercy and grace
You paint us rainbows and waterfalls to remind our eyes and our hearts of Your adoration,
Sunsets and sunrises to frame each day with psalms of joy

We all long for someone
We look for traces of their footprints in the crunching autumn leaves
and glances of their reflections in cool waters
But are we willing to make ourselves pebbles in order to build them up to be towers of stone?
To drop our books of self righteousness and our plans of self centeredness
The second we hear their voice call our name?
Would we lay down our life for them just as our Painter painted us an identity in His sacrifice

Too often we forget that "we love because He first loved us"
That He is love
We make ourselves to be the poster-children for hearts held in alabaster jars
Just waiting to shatter at the slightest touch of misguided lust
Falling like puzzle pieces because after all
puzzles are made to be broken and broken again
But we not
We are made in an image of love itself
It is our very nature to be whole despite our decision to turn from being holy
To be lovers and life-breathers and listeners
To mutually inspire and bless one another
as the moon calls the waves into the shore
and the waves provide the moon with a steadiness to make it through the darkness