Everyone makes mistakes

Hello all..

I'm typing this because I was thinking and mulling over something I learnt on Sunday. Basically some people messed up and well, now many people now know they messed up..

As a result of their guilt they have since taken to shying away from everyone, and a lot of us haven't seen them in a long while.. i wanted to say 'As a result of their mistake' but that would be inaccurate. Mistakes don't make you shy away. Guilt and self-pity might be the culprits..


In any disaster there HAS to be an effective way to help. (i believe so, at least) Or at least there are multiple effective ways to help.

(For those of us familiar with the Lagrangian formalism of classical mechanics, this constraint part will sound very similar)

Considering the various circumstances under which the mishap occurred, there are constraints which we have to consider. Perhaps there is a death in the family. Perhaps there is a financial crisis. Perhaps there is a grave illness. Perhaps there is a lack of family ties. The list goes on.

These constraints serve to limit the avenues of approach. Also, they might lend a clue to areas which we have to be sensitive in.



After considering the constraints, we must study the system. What happened?
Is it totally despicably unforgivable?

C.S. Lewis mentions in Mere Christianity that :
'It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can struggle itself into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardive, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity - that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite ontent to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense'

John Ortberg, in Everybody's Normal Till You Get To Know Them mentions that historically there are two categories for sin. Sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit. Regarding the latter:

'Rarely does a church exercise discipline over one of these sins. If you hear a pastor having to leave a church for "moral reasons," you can be pretty sure it's not pride. Churches in our day are not usually scandalised by sins like arrogance or self-righteousness.'

And afterward he concludes:
'We are most scandalised by sins of the flesh. Jesus was most scandalised by sins of the spirit.'

I don't think I'll further the discussion, because at this point it is first apparent that we can now leave all judgment in God's hands, for we are all in no position to throw stones.

This is the time when we get to show the mercy that was given to us. Free.

Onward.