Going from failure to failure

An inherent part of learning a new language and entering a new culture is messing up. And I was pretty ok with that when we were brand new. But being in a sustained mode of constantly messing up is hard on the morale. It's easy to get stressed out. It's easy to want to hide.

I started off with the decision to be enthusiastically engaged in the work. But one of the side effects of enthusiasm is making a high number of rookie mistakes. I cringe to think of how many dumb things I've signed and done - both because my language skills were lacking AND because my thinking and understanding were lacking! 

Should I have been more reserved at the beginning, to keep from offending people or hurting feelings? Maybe. But one thing I'm sure about - the Lord calls people who don't know what they're doing ALL. THE. TIME. And He expects us to learn by doing. And if you don't do, you don't learn. So maybe I'm a little over-enthusiastic, but I guess I'd rather be reprimanded for being too enthusiastic than for being timid...ok, I'd rather strike the perfect balance of caution and boldness, and be amazing, but since instant perfections isn't one of the options, I'll take boldness.

So, since FAILURE is a theme of my life right now, here are some amazing quotes from a General Conference talk that spoke directly to me, by Elder Lynn G. Robbins of the Seventy. Because now that the newness of not knowing what I'm doing has worn off, my next step is to continue from failure to failure without losing any enthusiasm. So here we go!

"To learn a foreign language, one must face the embarrassment of making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million." (See, I told you he was talking directly to me!)

“Success,” it has been said, “isn’t the absence of failure, but going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.”1

"Repentance is God’s ever-accessible gift that allows and enables us to go from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Repentance isn’t His backup plan in the event we might fail. Repentance is His plan, knowing that we will. This is the gospel of repentance, and as President Russell M. Nelson has observed, it will be “a lifetime curriculum.”

 “Change” is the principal word the Guide to the Scriptures uses to define repentance: “A change of mind and heart that brings a fresh attitude toward God, oneself, and life in general.”18 That kind of change results in spiritual growth. Our success, then, isn’t going from failure to failure, but growing from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.

We may wonder—if both Nephi and Moses were on the Lord’s errand, why didn’t the Lord intervene and help them achieve success on their first try? Why did He allow them—and why does He allow us—to flounder and fail in our attempts to succeed? Among many important answers to that question, here are a few:

• First, the Lord knows that “these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good.”4
• Second, to allow us to “taste the bitter, that [we] may know to prize the good.”5
• Third, to prove that “the battle is the Lord’s,”6 and it is only by His grace that we can accomplish His work and become like Him.7
• Fourth, to help us develop and hone scores of Christlike attributes that cannot be refined except through opposition8 and “in the furnace of affliction.”9

 So, Christine, just remember that.