To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
Would you rather work on an easy puzzle or a hard puzzle?
The New York Times, which has been publishing its famous crossword puzzle every day since 1942, offers readers a choice.
Monday’s puzzles are for beginners. Things get a little tougher on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
By Thursday, the average reader will probably need to have a dictionary and thesaurus nearby. The ultimate crossword challenge arrives every Saturday.
The huge Sunday puzzle (21 squares by 21 squares, instead of the standard 15-square dimensions) is tackled by at least 500,000 people every week and is typically rated as a “Thursday” on the difficulty scale.
People are defined by the puzzles they try to solve.
Some of us are beginning-of-the-week people. We’re perfectly content to stick with the foundational stuff: getting to work on time, paying the light bill, staying in touch with the key people in our lives.
The most interesting puzzles, however, are the ones that come at the end of the week. They are not easy. They push us to our limits.
But more than anything else, “weekend puzzles” shape our character.
How can we end human trafficking? How do we restore civility to our culture? How can we eradicate childhood diseases? How should we represent God in the public square?
Sometimes the Good Life is pictured as having to solve fewer and fewer puzzles.
From time to time spiritual maturity is even marketed as getting to curl up with a Monday crossword on our laps for the rest of our lives.
But as corporate change guru Ichak Adizes points out, the only condition that absolutely guarantees the end of all life’s puzzles is death: “Having fewer problems is not living. It’s dying. Addressing and being able to solve bigger and bigger problems means that our strengths and capacities are improving.”
We don’t have to look very far in Scripture to discover that God has equipped every follower of Jesus to trade up for problems and puzzles that are worthy of our best efforts.
Consider 2 Timothy 1:7, which declares, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline.”
“Self-discipline” is a translation of the Greek word sophronismos, which literally means “having a sound mind.” It’s notoriously hard to pin down in English, and various translations opt for “sound judgment,” “self-control,” “wise discretion,” “temperance,” “sobriety,” and “sensibility.”
The bottom line is that God, through his Spirit, supplies us with the kind of temperament and resilience to tackle life’s greatest challenges.
Don’t settle, therefore, for a lifetime of Tuesdays.
Our call is to help solve the world’s weekend puzzles.