Along with tens of millions of others, I’m addicted to playing Wordle. Daily, the New York Times offers a grid on which we have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, we get feedback through colored tiles, indicating whether letters we’ve chosen are correct and in the right position within the word (green), correct but in the wrong position (yellow), or not in the word (gray). The goal is to deduce the hidden word within the six tries.
For the first couple of years, I gritted my mental teeth whenever my first guess ended with five gray squares. “Drat, I wasted a turn.” Sometimes my second or even third attempt ended with all gray squares. “Double or triple drat! I’m doomed to lose because I have no letters to build on.”
Then it hit me. Coming up with all gray squares on the first try isn’t a road to failure, but a solid lead to the letters not to use again. Eliminating letters leaves a smaller pool of possible letters from which to choose for the next try. I try again and then try again, if necessary, each time using what I learned from the previous gray letters along with the colored ones I hit. It’s rare that I don’t uncover the right word by the end of six tries.
It can be the same with God. We take a problem to God and ask for a solution. But our first attempt or even subsequent attempts to follow what we think God suggests don’t work. The situation continues. We get frustrated. Maybe folks don’t like or don’t want what we have to offer. Does God not hear right, not care, or maybe not love us enough? No! No! No! Something else is at work here.
Before we move on to what the “something else” is, however, let’s look at the large picture of interacting with God. With God’s Wordle we’re not talking about life-threatening or otherwise dire situations, those when we turn to and plead with God from our inner being for immediate care, justice, or assistance. When your child is sick in the night and can’t breathe neither we nor God look at it as a time for a learning experience using God’s gray squares. Both the need and the response are urgent.
Our analogy here is about seeking guidance when we ask, “How, God?” “How do we solve a situation, work with a certain person or group, answer a question, or follow your will.” “Show me your will for me and how to do it.”
Thanks be to God; we aren’t spoon-fed answers or solutions. Rather, God leads us to use our God-given resources of intellect, intuition, power of deduction, and emotions to work through issues so we’re strengthened to handle similar ones in the future. This is part of what is meant by the term spiritual growth. We weren’t created to be spiritual puppets, having to rely on God to pull the strings of our life without input from us.
Sometimes our first stab at God’s Wordle ends in all gray squares. Sometimes our first several tries reap only grays. Yet, as with the game, these aren’t failures but opportunities to hone our skills at hearing and following God by taking what we learn from the experience about what doesn’t work and move forward with a clearer idea of what will. Ask any newly minted pastor about her first sermon or committee meeting at her first church. You might get all smiles, but you’re more likely to hear about her perceived failure in one way or another. From there, however, she is given the opportunity to continue on and grow into the instrument of God that she was meant to be.
I’m reminded of a friend telling of supervising a student teacher on her first day. The student teacher’s prep was perfect to the last word, she’d practiced over and over, and she’d walked into the classroom full of confidence. But soon she burst back through the door in sobs and blubbered, “I told them everything I know, and it only took ten minutes! I’m done! I’m a failure at teaching! What am I going to do?” Take those gray squares back to the drawing board and try again tomorrow, dear heart. With the help of her teaching supervisor, she did, and she turned out to be an excellent teacher.
Even the saints of old had early failures—gray squares—sometimes for years. The reason we read of them today is because they stayed with God’s Wordle until they found the right answer.
As we travel along the path of doing God’s will, let’s remember that the gray squares we inevitably will encounter are the stumbling stones that teach us where (or not) to put our feet -- not roadblocks.
-- Karen Kaigler-Walker
HTC UWFaith Spiritual Growth Coordinator
