There are times when I feel like I am making incredible progress, great strides towards "becoming", and there are times when I fall flat on my face. As far as I can tell, that is pretty much the norm. Details vary, but watching other people move through the back of my ambulance, and through the ER and listening to teens as we talked about life and growing up, back in my youth ministry days, life is pretty much a mess for everyone.
Life is a mess for everyone. Cool, calm and collected exteriors hide an internal frenzy of fear, panic and a history filled with plenty of failures. Housewives with the perfect house, everything in order, get carted off to rehab and AA almost every day of the week. Leaders fail, and disappear. Children run away. Jobs are lost. Mistakes are made.
Progress is usually not made while reading leadership books in Starbucks, but while picking yourself up after a fall, dusting yourself off and trying again. That is what I tell my son whenever he falls, if he is not hurt I encourage him to get up and dust off. Really, I'm not so concerned about dirt as much as him getting back up each time he falls down.
I've been Catholic for nine years now, liturgically speaking. I was baptized on the vigil of Trinity Sunday in 2001. Realistically, I had my honeymoon with the faith during my conversion. I spent my twenties, after converting .... I spent my twenties poorly, made plenty of mistakes, failed as a leader and disappeared, running across states to do so, made mistakes and lost a job that I loved. It is only half of a joke that after being Catholic for almost a decade, the only thing that I am good at is mortal sin.
But what is the point of failing so often? Obviously there is a lesson (or many) to be learned. There is definitely a huge part of myself that I have yet to give up control over and acquiesce. Goal for my 10th year -- Acquiesce. That, and get back up, knuckle it out and make some progress.
