Allowing Failure

I watched Dave Ramsey's Town Hall for Hope, which was an excellent program filled with very down-to-earth and practical reasoning and talk.

Such practical thinking such as:

1. We are all responsible for ourselves, IOW, having someone else "take care of you" is not being responsible.
2. Fear eats hope and everything else.
3. Today's economy is not the Great Depression.  Check out these statistics.
4. If you do something stupid, you will more than likely suffer the consequences of it.
5. Do business with people not numbers or entities
6. Your work and businesses are in business to serve the customer not bilk the customer.
7. Capitalism works but there has to be morality injected into it.

And lots of other stuff that was presented much better than anything I could do.  Check out the site.  Lots of valuable information there.

My favorite is that Dave Ramsey has met a lot of good-hearted people who have wanted nothing other than to ease and solve the pain of others.  As Dave says, we need to love people so much that we allow them to fail. 

Failing is learning and it's learning at its very best and learning forever. 

This is the same rule we are taught as parents.  We love our children, and the last thing we want is for them to suffer or have a hard time of things.  But without these struggles, our children never learn.  If your child never tripped, he/she would never learn about cracks in the sidewalk, or what causes trips and how to avoid them and move on down the road to learn other important life lessons.

We all know people who have been rescued all their lives, and are they are a burden on the rest of us. 

Our lives are the same. The more we are rescued from experiencing the results of our mistakes and the rewards of our smart decisions, the more we learn.  If we are "rescued" from these, we never learn, and make the same mistakes not only to repeat them continuously, but may never know how to stop them much less that they can.  This is a life doomed to failure with the participant never knowing why.  Almost like hell on Earth. 

At the same time, looking at failure from a completely different point of view - one of a learning opportunity, affords us the chance to not only learn from our failure, but to approach it from a positive view.  This allows us to be in a much better and more effective state of mind to work through to a solution. 

Not only do we come out of these experiences learning, but approaching failure from the point of view that it is a learning experience, puts us in a state of mind that does not foster bitterness, anger, jealousy and resentment that can poison future relationships or endeavors. 

For me, this is the paramount reason that God entreaties us to give up revenge and Christ encourages forgiveness.  We humans are not meant to be burdened with these emotions as they eat and decay any positive and good feelings we may have.  This alone, is a compelling reason to give up these resulting negative and decaying thoughts in the midst of failure.  The next most compelling reasons to avoid these negative thoughts during times of failure is that it is almost impossible to see your way out of bad times without hope. And hope comes from positive and good thoughts.

Good thoughts then bring good feelings.  Good feelings then allow you to work through and correct or start again after your failure - they also give you the energy to work and keep going.

What faith offers is hope and hope is the beginning of blossoming in hard times.

Comments

[Sandy Murray]

I recently discovered your sewing blog and then late tonight I discovered this one. I only had time to merely skim it tonight and will return as soon as possible to read it thoroughly...I am intrigued and expect to learn some good things. In the meantime, if it's convenient, I wondered if you could tell me how you view Christian suffering (as in Christ saying that in this life we will have suffering, and that we are to pick up our crosses, and that we must be crucified with Him, and so on). I have never known how to balance the "suffering" part of Christian belief with expecting good things, and have tended to err on the side of suffering. Needless to say, this confusion has tended to keep me "stuck" in a sometimes less than joyful spirituality. It can be kinda hard to seriously "grow" your spiritual life in the absence of joy and in the face of confusion. The amazing thing may be that I've hung onto faith at all.