Whether you are embarking on a new career, struggling to cut costs or just worried about bathing suit season, the turning of the seasons often inspires change. Yet the same factors that embolden us, often lead us to failure.
Decided you can restart your outdoor
fitness routine? Bam! 15 inches of snow and you’re back on the couch, watching Battlestar Galactica reruns. Starting a new organic diet inspired by the First Lady’s
White House garden? An evening freeze comes along and the ground is too hard to till. Back on the couch, catching Bravo reruns. Determined to return to church as Easter approaches? Sunday mornings are still too cold and dark. You guessed it, back on the couch….
Blame it on our evolutionary beginnings. Don’t believe in that Darwinian stuff? Blame it on our human condition. Whether we are descendants of Lucy or Eve, humans are hardwired against self-control.
The key is recognizing the need to change but also forgetting our past failures.
If you are like me, you remember that last year (and the year before that, and the year before that….) you started a new fitness routine that yielded results, results that are now long gone. Does that mean we abandon any efforts to get back into shape, expecting another year of failure? No. We begin again, exhausted perhaps, but moving toward the goal nonetheless.
The apostle Paul, well known for his remarkable conversion from Christian-stoning Pharisee to human history’s most widely read Christian author, recognized our inherent weaknesses, and recommended this advice:
“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal.” Philippians 3:13–14
He speaks from experience, saying to anyone who will listen (and the Bible has a few readers!) “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect.”
We’re all imperfect. If we weren’t, the publishing industry would go out of business. That doesn’t mean we can’t change – even if we’ve failed in the past. It just takes a little selective remembering. If you can’t forget your wedding anniversary, you can definitely forget last year’s failed fitness routine, or the budget you blew in a week, or the job interview you flubbed, and on and on.
I recently talked to the owner of a lunchtime spot in downtown Dallas. The man, probably in his mid-to-late forties, told me that he was performing in a local production of Pippin.
“Have you always been in theatre?” I asked.
No, I chickened out on an audition when I was in high school, he responded. But it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.
I think that’s what St. Paul meant by all that forgetting.
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