Great Lent, Day 26 - To Persist

I set out my goals in the last post, and at a mere twenty-five days in I have already failed most of them at least once - but in doing so, I have learned some valuable lessons. 

The first is humility. I typically think of myself as an exceptionally strong-willed person. In the last twenty-five days my willpower has been put to the test, and while I have had many successes I have had even more failures. But if I fail one day, that doesn't say anything about the next. I get up the next morning and try again - and if I don't, then the next morning after that is fair game. Which brings me to my second lesson: 

Persistence. What defines us: falling down, or getting up? I'd say it's whichever you did most recently. We fail. We fail a lot. It's part of being human, it's part of life. The only human being who never sinned was Christ Himself (to quote liturgy, 'for Thou only art without sin'), and He is a bit of a special case. So accepting that we will, inevitably, fail - what do we do? Try again. In Thirty Steps to Heaven, Papavassiliou says it much more eloquently than I can here, but fundamentally it's trying that matters -  trying to be better, to master our passions, to unite ourselves to God, to walk the path of a good Christian (which includes being a good person). Or to quote Batman, why do we fall down? To pick ourselves back up. 

We're halfway through Great Lent, and I'll venture to say we've all tripped up once or twice, and not done as much as we could. Great Lent is the school of repentance, though. So let us all take our failures as a lesson, and try to do better. We'll fail again, naturally, but maybe we'll fail a little bit less, and get a little bit closer to our goal and our God. 

Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. 

With love,

Magdalene