By Daniel Garner
"For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of love, power and self-discipline" - 2 Timothy 1: 7
"All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today" - Pope Paul VI
Men's Health magazine confuses me. On one page there's an article on how you're perfect just the way that you are and on the next page there's an article titled "How to Lose Your Gut in Five Days". It's enough of a contradiction for me to wonder sometimes why I should even buy one or try what it recommends
Okay, so why do we even try?
Whether it's to lose a gut and gain a six-pack or anything? Especially those times when we know that there is a large margin for failure. Like the guarantee of being able to bench-press a Llama after the three-shirt-sizes-to-small personal trainers' 27 Step Plan at the gym.
So...why?
For me, it's because trying is what differentiates us from those who don't have hope.
Each one of us intrinsically understand the magnitude of simply trying for something. And it's in that innate knowledge that is the culmination of the best sides to ourselves: Our faith and our hope!
Then sometimes we try to hard for things. We want something so bad we can't see straight and we're absolutely besides ourselves with desire! Or the reason why we're trying to hard is because we've messed up, and it's not the kind of mess-up where we just forgot to put the milk back up.
Sometimes we keep trying to fix the problem, vice, or wrong that we did in the first place for so long and so hard with such wonderfully vain intentions just so we don't have to ask for that forgiveness or face it.
Because then we'd have to accept fully how we hurt.
Ourselves, or those we love.
Still you try so hard so much that you begin to overcompensate, like a car turning on a slick road, that you not only do not rectify the original mistake but you add to it. The danger to this is that the cycle keeps repeating, again and again, becoming systemic. Wisdom is knowing when to stop.
Strength? Sometimes the true test of it is knowing how to let go.
The Takeaway: One of the true tests of who we say we are is what we do when we realize we've done something wrong. Remember, life isn't always what we choose to make it, but how we react to it is!