Life is Like Sudoku

Mitch loves his Rubik’s – 3x3, 4x4 and even the Professor’s 5x5. He even wanted a “back-up” 5x5 where the tiles are stickers rather than glued-on real tiles (like his current one) so he can play more freely without worrying about the tiles chipping off and being lost. Around Thanksgiving, I thought this was an unnecessarily frivolous expenditure and naysayed his request. Two days before Christmas with no gift for my husband, I felt differently and walked into Barnes & Noble looking for a Professor’s Cube. Why would I expect to find a Professor’s Cube at Barnes & Noble? I don’t know, I just want things to be easy and be located wherever I’m looking for them.

While they don’t carry a Professor’s Cube at Barnes & Noble, I did find something I thought would satisfy my husband – a Sudoku book. I had vaguely heard of Sudoku as a current craze, but when I read that it’s being called “the Rubik’s Cube of today” I knew I had a winner Christmas present for my husband.

What I didn’t realize is how much I would enjoy it myself, or that it could become a fun family activity we could do together. I also found a “Rubik’s Sudoku” set which has repositionable colored tiles which you can arrange to form any Sudoku puzzle, then solve. If you’re not fond of numbers and love colors, this set is for you. The tiles have numbers if you need them, but the colors stand out far more vividly.

Sudoku can be easy enough for our ten-year-old son – or for me – and it can be challenging enough to satisfy my Rubikian husband. I read the tips that came with the book and color-tile set, but it was Mitch who helped me see the puzzle differently.

Just in case you’ve never tried Sudoku, you have to fill a 9x9 grid on paper with the numbers 1 through 9 in any order so that every row, every column, and the nine 3x3 cubes within the 9x9 grid each contain the numbers 1 through 9, using each number only once in each row, each column, and each 3x3 cube. The puzzle comes with a few numbers filled in for you, and the rest are blank. You figure it out one square at a time, using pure logic. If you guess and you’re wrong, you throw off your results for the entire puzzle. So you really shouldn’t complete a square until you know for sure that one number and no other should be in that spot.

If you can’t stand numbers, know that this has nothing to with math. You could just as easily use pictures of nine different NFL logos. In fact, I was thinking maybe my 4-yr old would enjoy Sudoku if I could come up with a simpler version say in 4x4 or 6x6, using pictures of different farm animals instead of numbers. It’s the same principle.

Even before I wrapped the book for Mitch, I couldn’t take my eyes off the first puzzle, although I didn’t of course work it since I didn’t want to spoil his gift. After giving it to Mitch, I started “borrowing” it to play myself. I was fumbling along on my first puzzle, enjoying the process but taking rather a long time about it, when Mitch showed me a different way to look at it. Instead of trying to figure out what three or four numbers were missing from a row, which is time-consuming, he helped me look at the rows or columns in groups of three. He was immediately able to solve the simplest squares by just scanning three rows or three columns. If he saw the same number twice, he could often complete that number in the missing column or row. I know this story begs for an illustration, but I barely have time to write about it, much less find pictures that show you what I mean. But if you already play Sudoku you understand. And if you start playing you will quickly get my point as well.

Now here is what really excites me. Coming up to a New Year, I am once again thinking of the zillion ways my life needs to change. Diet changes, exercise, better time management, more time spent in prayer/worship/Bible study/Bible memory; controlling my emotions, keeping up with relationships, making the best use of the few short years we have to disciple our children, working on better ways of communicating with Mitch (less nagging), becoming an empowered person in my home/work/life, calling my mother and my sister more often, contacting my 100+ relatives more than once a decade, dealing with our financial shortfalls, the need to better train our dogs, and the ever-present problem of doing something about all the stuff in my basement.

On and on. It becomes overwhelming to me and then I slip into hopeless “nothing will ever change” mode. And worst of all, Mitch is disappointed by my chronic stressing.

And that is where my life feels like Sudoku, a fiendish level puzzle.

If I look at the entire puzzle, particularly as a novice, I feel overwhelmed by all the blank spots, all the data that doesn’t seem to correlate.

But if I can find a mentor, I don’t need that mentor to give me the answers necessarily, but to help shape my ways of looking at the problems.

I think the number one change I need to make this New Year’s is NOT to have a list of resolutions which I will dump within one week or less, leaving me in the dumps.

Rather, I think I need to do two things in 2007:

1) Look at my life in terms of patterns. Most of the changes I need to make would be affected by one or two areas. Instead of making lists of changes, I’m going to focus on finding “mentors” – friends or book authors – who can help me see the patterns of my life in a more strategic way.
2) Resist the urge to make unsustainable big changes. Instead, make tiny incremental changes which will become habitual. Einstein spoke of the greatest “invention” of all being the miracle of compounded interest. If it works that well in the realm of money, how about in the realm of personal habit?

Like Sudoku, I think solving one square will yield clues to solve other squares, more importantly giving me emotional momentum, encouragement that change is possible.

What would you like to do differently in 2007?

My Big Fat Weird Family

Everyone has weird relatives. If you doubt this, watch any group of unrelated people who will talk freely about how they spent Thanksgiving. You’re bound to hear a tale or five. If you think you don’t have weird relatives, check out the mirror, maybe you’re the one the others talk about when they get alone with friends.

(Disclaimer: If Mitch’s relatives or mine happen to read this, please be assured that I am, of course, speaking only about the other relatives.)

Truth is, you don’t get to pick your family. In our culture, you can select your spouse, and that’s about it. As individualistic and choice-driven as Americans love to be, you just can’t decide who gets to be your Aunt Wilma, or your in-laws (unless you had the foresight to cover this in your spousal interview), or that pierced persona threatening to run off with your daughter. For the most part, you don’t get to pick the people you’re going to hug and condole and congratulate at weddings, funerals, graduations and holidays for the rest of your life. Sometimes I think it’s one of God’s little practical jokes, a gift to enliven us with the unexpected and the uncontrollable, to help us take ourselves a little less seriously. Some people take this reality in stride, while others react by moving far, far away.

(Disclaimer: Mitch & I live in Colorado because we love mountains, not because Colorado is about as distant as you can get from both Georgia and California simultaneously. Besides, the craziest one of all lives just down the road.)

However much you might complain about your kin’s embarrassing eccentricities, you love them because blood makes you family. And you also, if you’re a nice person, accept the ones they chose because marriage and adoption also make you family. That doesn’t mean you approve of them, agree with them, want to spend time with them, or even like them – it just means you’re RELATED and they have certain claims on you in a way no one else does.

Of course, in the best of cases, you do like them and enjoy them and want to be with them whenever you can. I love my family: the straight-laced and the tattooed, graduates of seminary or rehab, veterans and young soldiers, politicians and truck drivers, veterinarians and novelists, home schoolers and public school teachers. I’ve got one relative whose company engineered the sound on movies you’ve watched, and another who cooks on a wood stove by choice and displays more guns than most preachers own Bibles.

Wacky, wild or wonderful, I get warm fuzzy feelings when I think of them all!

It’s the same with my bigger family, my two billion brothers and sisters around the world who have individually decided that faith in Jesus Christ is a once in eternity proposition too sweet to pass up. You know, some of these people are really, truly weird. Some of them have annoying habits. Some of them are just plain messed up and should be in rehab. Some just got out of rehab and live with more zeal than prudence.

But you’re my relatives, and I love you all. If you believe Jesus is God, and that he died on the cross to take the heat for every wrong choice you’ve ever made – you’re my family. (And if not, you’re my neighbor.)

Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with everything you have to say, and you might get on my nerves with some of your quirks, oddities, or what I might consider to be unbiblical theology. And no doubt you could return the same sentiment about me. But you’re family, made so by the power of His blood, by our marriage to His son. We are siblings, both by birth and adoption.

A family is not formed by affection alone, however much we might wish to belong. It takes birth, marriage, or adoption. The family of God is formed by all three

And just like my natural relatives, I didn’t get to choose who belongs. I just accept and love the ones God chose to be my family. Every time I go to church (particularly on those occasions when I get to visit a church different than my preferred style), I get this excited feeling inside, because I love the Bride of Christ in all her wild, crazy, wonderful variety and sometimes weirdness.

Love is not the same as unilateral, uniform, unquestioning insipid tolerance. Love celebrates differences, but love also questions inconsistencies, confronts incongruities, gently exposes weaknesses and failings in a spirit of restoration and mutual growth. Love is iron sharpening iron, neither yielding, sparks flying, yet understanding that in the end, we are of the same element.

And that element is blood.