A comment Leah made started me thinking a little about the puzzles. Leah mentioned they make you smarter. I see where she is coming from. These puzzles definitely educate you on mostly useless trivia, for example, by filling in the other clues I learned the capital city of a foreign country I had not known before. Never mind that I can't remember it this morning. If it comes up as a clue a few more times the information it will most likely stick. And it is important to know how to spell in order to complete crosswords. Still, ability to work crosswords is not an accurate measure of intelligence, and neither is not having that ability.
It's a little like mental arm wrestling. Strength is secondary to technique. A weaker opponent with the right technique can pin the arm of a much stronger person who does not have that skill. The lateral thinking that is required for logic and crossword puzzles is more technique than intelligence. It's a matter of being able to think in a different way than normal, everyday, living requires. Here's a word problem that shows what I mean. A man rides into town on Monday. He stays for three nights, and then leaves on Monday again. Why or how?
Someone who does not naturally think laterally will frustrate themselves trying to come up with the answer. How is this possible? It doesn't make sense. There are four days unaccounted for. But the lateral thinker comes at the problem from a different perspective and realizes that Monday is the name of the man's horse. There are crossword clues that are a lot like the problem with the horse. They are almost corny. It's not that some people don't know the definitions, but rather they don't think sideways.
I can think sideways, but I have real issues thinking mechanically. My brother Jon can look at something and understand how it works, how to take it apart, put it back together and how to build something like it or even better. I have to stop and think righty tighty lefty loosey every time I need to work a screw driver. That kind of thinking simply does not come naturally to me. I could be wrong, but I doubt that Jon does logic problems for fun. Our brains are wired differently.
To some extent we can learn to think in different ways. A person can learn how to work puzzles, even if it is always a struggle or outside their comfort zone. A person can learn things like the rule of thirds to be better at photography, but it will always be easier for the person who naturally sees and composes the scene in their mind from an artistic way of thinking. A person can use a book to learn to build and fix things. But you're always going to be best at things that fall within your natural aptitude and skill set, unless your brain changes.
God's ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. There are some very intelligent people who can never appear as such on spiritual matters, and there are simple people who can seem wiser than sages. Then there are intelligent people like C.S. Lewis and Ravi Zacharias who can come off like geniuses as they act as go betweens, translating one way of thinking into another form that more can understand. You can learn some about how to think as God thinks by learning what God thinks, but in order to really understand spiritual matters, you have to think spiritually. That takes being given a new mind, wired differently than the old mind, created by God to think as He does.
It's like suddenly being able to see and understand how mechanics work, or gaining a natural ability to think sideways outside the box. It doesn't necessarily make you any smarter, but it does open up a whole other aspect of reality. The best thing is that this new and better mode of thinking is available to us all. It's a free gift. When we come to Him, He gives us a new mind with a Godly way of thinking mode as its natural base. The problem is that we have this new mind housed in the old shell. Sometimes we forget that we can think in the new mode, sometimes we slip back into old patterns, and at all times the two approaches to reality are at war with each other. But the more we surrender to Him, the stronger the new mind grows and the old way of thinking dies away. Then the puzzles of the things of God and spiritual matters begin to make sense.
Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on
February 25, 2016.
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