{"id":5461,"date":"2026-05-26T08:46:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T12:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5461"},"modified":"2026-05-26T08:46:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T12:46:30","slug":"trading-up-for-harder-puzzles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/26\/trading-up-for-harder-puzzles\/","title":{"rendered":"Trading Up for Harder Puzzles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

Would you rather work on an easy puzzle or a hard puzzle?

The New York Times<\/em>, which has been publishing its famous crossword puzzle every day since 1942, offers readers a choice.

Monday’s puzzles are for beginners.\u00a0Things 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.\u00a0\u00a0

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.\u00a0\u00a0

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.\u00a0They push us to our limits.\u00a0

But more than anything else, “weekend puzzles” shape our character.

How can we end human trafficking?\u00a0How do we restore civility to our culture?\u00a0How can we eradicate childhood diseases?\u00a0How should we represent God in the public square?\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>

Sometimes the Good Life is pictured as having to solve fewer and fewer puzzles.\u00a0

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.\u00a0\u00a0

But as corporate change guru Ichak Adizes points out, the only condition that absolutely guarantees the end of all life’s puzzles is death:\u00a0“Having fewer problems is not living.\u00a0It’s dying.\u00a0Addressing and being able to solve bigger and bigger problems means that our strengths and capacities are improving.”

We don\u2019t 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, \u201cFor God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self-discipline.\u201d

\u201cSelf-discipline\u201d is a translation of the Greek word sophronismos<\/u><\/em>, which literally means \u201chaving a sound mind.\u201d It\u2019s notoriously hard to pin down in English, and various translations opt for \u201csound judgment,\u201d \u201cself-control,\u201d \u201cwise discretion,\u201d \u201ctemperance,\u201d \u201csobriety,\u201d and \u201csensibility.\u201d

The bottom line is that God, through his Spirit, supplies us with the kind of temperament and resilience to tackle life\u2019s greatest challenges.

Don’t settle, therefore, for a lifetime of Tuesdays.\u00a0 \u00a0

Our call is to help solve the world’s weekend<\/em> puzzles.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click 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.\u00a0Things get a little tougher on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. By Thursday, the average reader will… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1120,1119],"class_list":["post-5461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-challenges","tag-self-discipline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5463,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5461\/revisions\/5463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}