PUZZLING PUZZLES

    Hello Friends and Neighbors,
        My husband and I are puzzle nuts.  We do crosswords, jumbles, and cryptoquips.  Well, we try! Sometimes we have better luck at it than others, especially with the cryptoquip puzzles, but we try!  (We do jig saw puzzles, also, but that’s another story!)

            Today was one of the good days.  We accomplished all three of the puzzles in the Bangor Daily News quite successfully. We often work on them alone, passing the crossword back and forth until it’s done, copying the jumble, so we can each work it separately, and the cryptoquip... well, that is sometimes whoever gets to it first!

            Today we tackled the crypto together.  We have very different styles of how to get it started.  He likes to think about it quite a bit before putting a letter down.  Me? I jump right in!  If it remotely looks like a letter might work, I write it in and hope for the best as I jump on to the next possibility.  Of course I do it with a pen, which does get me into trouble quite often! But I cross out and move on.  More often than not we both actually have learned to solve the puzzles in our own unique ways.

            As we were looking at the crypto in today’s paper, pondering after we inserted the one letter they gave us to get started on, I was ready to jump in with an A, right off the bat.  There was a single letter word, and we knew it had to be either an A or an I. I wanted the A; he was a bit hesitant, but went with my idea.  As I looked at other possibilities, I would suggest, “This could be...” and I’d tell him what I thought a word might be. Sometimes he hesitatingly, very hesitatingly, agreed to write it in.  We got a few words that started to make sense, but guess what?  My A was wrong!  It was an I, after all, just as he had suspected. I should have listened! But if we had waited about putting something down for the single letter word, we probably would have been puzzling the puzzle for a much longer time, and maybe we’d have given up.  We had to start somewhere.

            This led us to a conversation about life.  We have to start somewhere.  Starting means moving.  We can’t accomplish anything, if we remain motionless.  Sometimes, yes, we have to do some contemplating, but then we have to get in motion. A person cannot swim if he or she never moves. One has to not just step in, but one has to keep moving once he or she gets there.

            This brings to mind the verse in James 2:26—“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”  Works do not save us, but verse 22 says, “Seest thou how faith wrought with his [Abraham’s] works, and by works faith was made perfect?”  Faith, once established, together with works accomplishes God’s purposes in our lives. Faith is the jumping in and works are the motions, the swimming, if you will, that move us forward in life.

            I guess I’ve said all this to remind myself that I cannot remain idle if I want to accomplish any goal, large or small.  Once I’ve established that it’s a goal (the contemplation), then I need to step into the water. Whether it’s a small pond, a lake, or a huge ocean, at that point, I need to start moving forward as God leads.
And so for now, Good-bye and God Bless!  and
May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.  Romans 15:33