Failure and Success, a Lenten journey?
Monday Ministerial Musings
By Rev. Mark William Ennis
2024 Blog #12
March 24, 2025
Failure and Success, a Lenten journey?
Recently I saw a Facebook post that was shared by a number of my Facebook friends. This post outlined a formula for failure. The path to failure, was outlined as follows:
1. Blame all your problems on others.
2. Complain about everything.
3. Not be grateful.
This philosophy of life reminds me a bit of the sayings that were posted in my industrial shop class in grammar school.
One slogan read, “the only people who never make mistakes are the people who don’t do anything.”
Another plaque read, “if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you will repeat them.”
I have been out of grammar school a long time, but those two bits of learning stuck with me for all these years. Those from my shop class and those from Facebook, both point out that any problem, and solution starts within ourselves. If we externalize our problems, we will never solve them, and we will never succeed at life. Taking a good hard look at ourselves is the first step toward improvement, and success.
We Christians are now in the sacred and holy season of Lent. This season is composed of forty days (excluding Sundays) starting on Ash Wednesday and ending at Resurrection Day, a.k.a. Easter Sunday. This is a time of self-reflection so that we might improve ourselves and become closer to the righteousness that God requires. The thinking is that we only improve by taking a good look at ourselves. This is in direct contrast to the thinking of some people who would rather externalize their problems and failures rather than taking personal responsibility for them.
Are we succeeding or failing in the things that we wish to do? Have we begun to take a good inventory of ourselves or do we blame external causes for shortcomings. Only we can change what it is that we are doing to move toward better outcomes.
During this holy season of Lent, let us look at ourselves and determine how we can do better. Let us strive to be better people toward God, our neighbors, and even to ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, our lives will be better than they are now by following this pathway.
Please join me in taking this advice from Facebook, let us always be grateful, limit complaints, and always look to ourselves when things don’t go well. This just might be our formula for self-improvement.