March 20th ish 2013- Failure...

As I thought about writing this blog post, I actually didn't want to, mostly because I want to go to bed... yeah...

So this will probably be pretty fast. Sickness calls you know..

As I reflected in my journal, I was pretty discouraged at the beginning of my mission because we would set goals and rarely meet them. I didn't understand why we would set such lofty goals if we really didn't think that we would meet them. What was the point of trying? We were failing.

This brings me to what I want to talk about. This morning I sent out a thought of the day from a dear friend "There is no such thing as failure, just temporary setbacks."

Another friend responded saying that they believed that the only time you fail is when you stop trying. (and here's an awesome talk too... Latter-day Saints Keep on Trying)

And a quote from Confucius: "it does not matter how slow you go, so long as you do not stop."

So in all of these cases, we weren't failing as long as we were trying our best. We had no reason to be discouraged because we were succeeding, not failing.

It was a temporary setback. Just because we blew out one of our tires didn't mean we couldn't get it fixed and do better the next day. If we had failed, we would have given up, and never tried to get to our destination. We would have stayed inside all day and took off the missionary badge. But we didn't do that. We got up each morning, studied and prepared for the day and honestly did our best. Therefore we succeeded. We did not fail.

The gospel is to have faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement, to repent, to be baptized, to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost and to ENDURE TO THE END.

You keep going. No matter what. Hold tightly to that iron rod and press forward. Sure, you will stumble and fall, but you get back up and you keep going. Another quote by Confucius "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." Yupp. You just keep going.

And I did my best today, it didn't equal my best on a normal day, it didn't even equal my average, but I did my best in my circumstances, and therefore I did not fail. I succeeded gloriously with what I was given.