Suckered by Sudoku

It’s my mother-in-law’s fault. We were on vacation last week with Joni’s family. Joni’s mom, Betty had brought Sudoku, a board game version of the popular newspaper puzzle. Joni and I are now addicted.
The word is pronounced, Su – Doe- Ku it’s a Japanese word that means “mental torture that can become addictive over time.” The puzzle itself is seductively simple. It looks like a crossword puzzle minus the words. Its nine blocks long, and nine blocks wide. Thus you have 81 blanks of terror. There are random numbers in a few of the blocks. The goal is to fill in the blanks. You have to get the numbers, 1-9 in each row and column and each small grid of 16. You can’t repeat a number. There is only one correct solution and about 100 wrongs ones. Trust me on this.
It’s one of those activities in life like cobra charming that looks easy from a distance and is really wild when you do it yourself. But I’m a good sport, so I tackle a puzzle. Actually, it’s fun. It’s also very challenging. After about an hour and a half, I did what every college educated, logical, man of the cloth would do in these situations.

I cheated.

Hey, they put the answers on the back of the game card! I was just making sure I had the right number. If you get one number wrong, you are screwed up. (Technical puzzle solving term) Thus, it’s helpful to do these puzzles in pencil, rather than pen or crayon.
When we got home from vacation, I thought I would get some peace from this puzzle panic, and then Joni comes home from the grocery store. It seemed that one of the Sudoku books was taunting her at the check stand, so she had to buy it. The problem with the book is that we only have one. There are two of us in this marriage. So now we have Sudoku Wrestling to see who will get to do the next puzzle. We try to do these things while we watch T.V. in the evenings.

I say try, because unlike myself, Joni can multi-task. She can do a puzzle, do cross stitch, watch T.V. and hold an intelligent conversation all at the same time. Me? I have to have complete silence to tie my shoes. Thus, she can do more puzzles than I can. We also have a little competition in the book itself. We write notes on the top of each page, summarizing our puzzle experience. Joni smugly writes, “I did this one correct on the first try.” I write on my mine, “This took me 3 days and 400 eraser marks.”

I wonder if they have support groups for this sort of thing? The meeting would open with, “Hi, I’m Bob, and I’m a Sudoku addict.” In my group, I’m guessing there would be complete silence inn the group because everyone would be busying trying to place the #3 in the right spot.

They tell me that you have to use logic and reasoning to do Sudoku. That makes sense. That’s why people don’t do these puzzles during church. Many people think you have to check logic and reason at the door when you come to church, or read the Bible. Nothing could be further from the church.

The Bible tells me that I serve a Sudoku Savior. Look at Isaiah 1:18, Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.

We had sin in our lives. Sin has a price. Jesus paid the price for us and offered us that as a gift. We receive the gift it and we have eternal life. It’s simple logic. The Bible is logical and reasonable. If you don’t believe me, just sneak a peek at the answers in the last book in the Bible and we find out that God wins, and we win!

Now if I can just get that puzzle book away from Joni….