A Giant Step Toward Maturity
by Charles R. Swindoll
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:26
One of the hardest things for you and me to do is own up to our own failures.
Whether we're talking to our spouses, our kids, our employers, or with our Lord Himself, it goes against the grain to come clean and admit our offenses. The knee-jerk response every time is to employ defense mechanisms: to deny, to excuse, to rationalize, to reinterpret our shortfalls.
The best and healthiest course is to 'fess up. To call failure, "failure." To name sin for what it is. To admit we were wrong, and having declared it, to learn what God may have to teach us from the experience.
Sir Winston Churchill . . . offered the best definition of success I've ever read: "Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." . . .
As you begin to interpret failure correctly, you will take your first giant step toward maturity.
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