Behind the Song Missing Pieces

It was supposed to be a simple weekend getaway.

Tim and Sasha were in Evanston, Wyoming, walking through a thrift shop when Tim noticed a small nativity scene sitting on a shelf. The pieces had been scattered around, separated from one another and apparently waiting to be gathered back together. He picked them up, found a box for the little figures, and decided to bring the nativity home.

Nothing about the moment suggested that it would become a song.

It was only after they returned home and the nativity was carefully arranged that its incompleteness became apparent. Something was missing.

Not one of the stable pieces. Not an animal or a shepherd.

The baby Jesus was gone.

So was one of the wise men.

The discovery was simple, almost incidental. But looking at the incomplete nativity created a much larger reflection: how often life itself feels like that.

We spend much of our lives wanting the pieces to fit. We want answers to questions that remain unanswered. We want direction when the road ahead is unclear. We want opportunities that have not yet come, explanations for things that have happened, and clarity about things we cannot yet see.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, pieces are simply missing.

And yet the nativity was still beautiful.

The remaining figures still told a story. The stable was still there. The scene still carried meaning. Its incompleteness did not erase what remained.

That became the heart of “Missing Pieces.”

The song does not try to resolve every unanswered question. Instead, it considers what faith looks like when the picture is unfinished. There is a particular honesty in that idea. Faith is not always having every piece in place. Sometimes faith is continuing forward while knowing that it isn’t.

But the nativity offered another thought, perhaps the more important one.

Although the figure representing Jesus was physically absent from the scene, the missing figure was precisely what drew attention to Him.

The absence became a reminder of His presence.

That idea gives the song its spiritual center. There are seasons when Christ may not seem immediately visible in our circumstances. Challenges can obscure Him. Disappointment can make His presence harder to recognize. Unanswered prayers can leave us wondering where He is.

But the answer may not always be found by simply waiting for circumstances to change.

We find Him in what we choose to do.

We find Him when we serve someone who needs us. We find Him when we forgive. We find Him in compassion, kindness, and love. We find Him as we make and keep covenants. We find Him when we continue forward in faith even without seeing the entire path.

The song’s central image therefore becomes more than a nativity missing two figures. It becomes a way of looking at discipleship.

The Christian life is not necessarily a life in which every piece is immediately supplied. It is a life of searching, recognizing, remembering, and moving forward.

There is also something fitting about the missing wise man.

The wise men were, by their very nature, seekers. They traveled toward something they had not yet fully seen. In the song, the missing wise man becomes part of the larger image: sometimes we are the ones still traveling. Sometimes we are still searching. Sometimes the journey itself is part of how we find what we are looking for.

That makes the song less about fixing an incomplete nativity and more about learning to live peacefully with an incomplete picture.

The source for the song was an ordinary memory—a thrift shop discovery during a weekend away. But ordinary memories sometimes contain larger truths. The little nativity provided a physical picture for something that is difficult to explain abstractly: we can live with missing pieces and still have something beautiful.

And perhaps more importantly, we can be missing pieces of the picture without being missing from God’s purposes.

The finished song gives that thought a voice through a conversation between a man and a woman. Their alternating perspectives allow the reflection to feel shared rather than preached. One voice encounters the incomplete scene; the other helps widen its meaning. Together, they arrive at the idea that the answer is not necessarily to possess the complete picture, but to keep looking toward Christ.

That is what the song ultimately preserves.

Not the details of a particular thrift shop.

Not even the little nativity itself.

It preserves a moment when something incomplete became a reminder of something complete: that Jesus Christ can still be found in the middle of uncertainty, in acts of service and compassion, in covenants kept, in forgiveness offered, and in the decision to keep walking by faith.

The nativity remains missing its pieces.

But it is not without meaning.

And neither are we.

Sometimes the pieces we are still waiting for are not evidence that the story has failed. They are simply evidence that the story is still being written.

And while it is being written, we can keep searching.

We can keep believing.

And we can keep finding Him.