Coffee Break

Yesterday my daughter sat on the floor with her wares spread out around her, making jewelry. She was using string, and glass bottles, and gears, and tiny beads. It was relaxing for her, at the end of the day, to sit on the floor and thread beads. Meanwhile I sat on the couch beside her, just to be nearby, but I was getting frustrated because the new Windows 10 on my computer  was dinging its alarm at me, claiming that my mscv100.dll was ( is still) missing. In computerese would msvc100.dll be a medical term for a crippling disease, a kidnapping alert, or a swear word?  I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I did not want to be there on the couch trying to figure it out. I wanted to be doing something else.

What do we do to relax? When I was young and living in Honduras, I got a lesson from my dad on convergent and divergent problems. He was sitting on his bed relaxing, just working on some kind of puzzle, a word puzzle most likely, and I walked in and interrupted him. I asked him about what was happening in some new church in some village or other. He looked up and said he didn’t really want to talk about it right then. Of course I asked why not. He said that there are two kinds of problems in life. One kind has a solution, just one, which, if you think things through logically enough, you can uncover on your own. Then there is another kind that does not really have a solution to be discovered. People problems fall in this category, and the problems that churches cause are this kind of problem. You can’t just think up a solution. You have to go to people and confront them and persuade them and help them change their thinking and their behavior before you reach a solution. You have to act. It’s not enough to sit on the bed with a pen and a piece of paper and your brain.

Dad said that puzzles are convergent problems. Their clues lead you to one satisfying solution. Church problems are divergent. There is no one solution. And nothing happens just by thinking about them. Dad was worn out from trying to resolve a particular divergent problem and his solution to that was to tackle a convergent problem for a few minutes before getting back to work. It isn’t obvious when church planters are taking work breaks, especially not to curious teenage daughters. I’ve learned a bit since then, not asking Robert to jump up and fix something when he’s on break, drinking tea and reading a page of a good book.

What helps us relax? For me it’s not tea because I just guzzle anything that’s set in front of me. I have to finish the glass before I set it down. (I think there is a medical term for this.) What helps me relax are things that focus my brain: a Van Gogh puzzle. A detective novel. Quiddler. Reciting poetry. All convergent problems.

I am amazed at how God made us so complex that in the midst of all we do, some work we find relaxing. He gave us left brains and right brains that switch back and forth. Did you know that if you rely too long on just the right, or just the left, you tire? We switch. In language learning, the sparky right makes snap connections between the sound and meaning, and it works in giant chunks. You make great progress using just the right brain. But you tire. The stodgy left controls the speech and the logic of the grammar and the word lists. But it’s slow. Methodical. You get discouraged at its bit-by-bit pace. You need both sides to keep you happy. Our brains and muscles and nerves switch and adjust and pass off jobs to other parts so much we cannot keep the story straight. I’m glad of the mystery. It’s Someone’s convergent puzzle that He’ solving on His coffee break, just relaxing.

Puzzle Bark