I tend to dwell on things of the past which I cannot change. Yes, I realize this is a character flaw. Why would I even think about things in the past, of which I have no ability to change? The past is the past. And I cannot change that. I know this in my mind, but, my heart has a hard time catching up.
I look back and have in my mind’s eye a picture of how things “could have been” and as reality is different from that, I’m not sure of what to do.
There are things professionally at work in several areas where I feel like I could have fixed things with the end result being different. I run the “if only…” game thru my mind and see something better, something that didn’t happen. Something that SHOULD have happened. Things left undone. Things not done well. Things not done at all.
The same goes for church work; lots of church work that hasn’t or isn’t getting done. Yeah, we’re talking about it and some things are moving forward. But, overall, it feels like we’re running through water carrying a 50 pound bag of flour on our backs that we need to keep dry.
As I run through these things, I tend to feel like a complete failure. I’ve heard it said that “success is harder to deal with than failure”. And lots of other good cute quotes that talk about learning from mistakes. However, given a choice, I tend to prefer the times of success.
I do like the journey. I find great joy in the journey. But, when nothing seems to be going “well”, well, then the joy feels a lot more like plain old work.
And then, even while thinking about writing this, I realized that there are a lot of “I’s” involved with this. Which begs the question, if I feel like I could have “fixed” something and failed to do so, am I making it more about me than anything else? It’s pretty arrogant to think that I am the great white hope to the millions (?!) of people watching the episode this week.
If we supposedly learn thru failure, then if I fail to do something which leads to other’s “failure” perhaps, they were to learn something thru that. It’s not about what it’s about. And if it’s not about me, then perhaps, just perhaps, THEY were to learn something thru the situation.
Now, as I re-read the title, i realize that even in this thought, it didn’t go the way it could have. I figured I’d come up with something profound to say on the subject and as usual, I waxed (non) poetic.
I’m processing here…
