Reset: A Good Method For Handling Life's Challenges

Pretending to Start Over is A Good Method For Handling Life's Challenges - Chapter 22, Book 1, Conclusions

When we learn to start over, or begin something new, we have a certain humility about our view of the situation.  When the challenges come to us, we expect imperfection and quickly act to remedy the fault.  This is what Thomas a'Kempis is talking about here at the end of Chapter 22.

We recognize and admit our thread-bare propensity to weakness.  Even when we are doing the right thing by confessing our grievous faults, we turn around and do these same "favorite sins" all over again.  The hard fought grace is now gone.

And so the counsel this week is to stay fervent, and not grow lukewarm.  Do not rest in curing our faults, and approach our miseries and life's slippery roads as we would if we were a new driver: with caution and quick correction.

6.  The frailty of mankind is great and is so prone to evil! Just today you confessed your sins, and tomorrow you commit again the sins you just confessed.

Now you resolve to avoid a certain fault, and within an hour you behave yourself as if you had never resolved against that fault at all.

Therefore, we have good cause to humble ourselves, and never to think highly of ourselves, seeing that we are so frail and unstable.

And this humility may even be lost quickly by our negligence, by which much labour was hardly attained through grace.

7. What shall become of us at the end, if at the beginning we are lukewarm and idle?

Woe unto us, if we choose to rest, as though it were a time of peace and security, while as yet no sign appears in our life of true holiness.

If only we could begin over again, like good novices, to be instructed in right living, if happily there might be hope of some future progress and greater spiritual maturity.

Next time, we will open Chapter 23, and see what Thomas has to tell us about mortality.

Until then, thank you for reading and praying along with me.

tim