The Maze

 It has become a tradition in our home that unless it’s raining cats and dogs or the roads are too icy to make the trek, our Sunday mornings begin with breakfast at a local diner. It’s close enough to the house that it’s not out of the way, and the food is always hot and fast, if not overly nuanced as far as the flavor profile is concerned. As a bonus, they have a kid’s menu with varying distractions for children on the back. There’s a word search, a couple of animals they can color, a few tic-tac-toe grids, and a maze. The maze has a starting and end point, and the object is to make it from start to finish without hitting a wall.

It’s a complicated maze. The girls had a hard time with it. There are countless dead ends, but only one way to make it from start to finish. More could be said about that, but I think you already get it, and that’s not the point of this writing. It took a few weeks of both girls getting frustrated and giving up before one morning, the older one smiled and said, “finished!”

“Let me see,” I said.

She handed me the paper, and one glance told me it looked too perfect. No hesitation, no squiggle marks, start to finish, one through-line.

“How did you do this?” I asked.

“I started at the end and worked my way back to the beginning," she answered.

“That’s cheating,” the little one piped up, and then the whole thing devolved into an argument between the two.

Whether what my daughter did is considered cheating or not is questionable. What I propose, however, isn’t cheating at all. It’s just a different way of looking at a problem; a way that may offer greater clarity.

It’s not so much reverse engineering; we’ll leave that to the Chinese. We start at the finish line and trace our steps back to the present, seeing all the sights and sounds along the way in reverse order. We know how it all ends. There are markers along the way that allows us to gauge how close we are. Granted, not all the signs of the end times are in chronological order, but the major ones, the ones that seem to build upon the previous ones, are.

For example, the world must be in chaos for the Mark of the Beast to appear on the scene; ergo, the mark of the beast will show up sometime after wars, plagues, earthquakes, and the beginning of persecution.

I know full well that this won’t satisfy some, anger others, and make others still arch their eyebrows in frustration. As Abraham Lincoln once said, plagiarizing John Lydgate, “you can please some of the people all the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.