Fall down seven times stand up eight

I have a confession.

At the beginning of the year I announced that one of my New Year Resolutions was to read the Bible from cover-to-cover in a year. It was all going so well… I had managed to get through the hard bits: the genealogies of Genesis, the battles of Exodus and even the liturgical rubrics of Leviticus. In fact, at the halfway point of this year I was even a little ahead of schedule in my daily reading.

Ah, but then things went awry… I had a couple of tough, busy weeks and it all went to pot. I got out of the habit of reading my Bible each day. The habit was broken and before I knew it, two months had passed and I hadn’t done any of my set reading.

As of yesterday, I was miles behind on my assigned schedule and hadn’t done any devotional reading in ages. Today that changed. Today I set aside some time. I read my Bible for about half an hour. It was long overdue. It was a small beginning, but at least it was a start.

This struggle to re-establish the habit of daily Scripture reading got me to thinking about a similar struggle in the Spiritual life…

Failures

Times of failure are so hard. It’s always tempting to think “Well, I’ve screwed this up. There’s no point trying again”. If you’re working towards a goal, failures and setbacks can be so demoralizing. There is the temptation to give up, particularly when the final goal seems so far off.

If you’ve ever tried dieting and ended up binging one evening, you’ll know the temptation just to throw in the towel. Starting again just seems too hard and helpless. I’ve heard people express something similar in reference to Confession, choosing to forgo Confession entirely rather than repeatedly confessing some habitual sin.

New Beginnings

In the spiritual life, we will always fall short. We will make mistakes and screw up, that’s inevitable. In the book of Proverbs, we read:

…a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again;
    but the wicked are overthrown by calamity. – Proverbs 24:16

There is a Japanese proverb , which I used as the title of this post, that expresses a very similar notion:

Fall down seven times, stand up eight – Japanese Proverb

This is what separates the Saints from everyone else. The difference is that they got back up when they fell. They dusted themselves off and started again back on the path to holiness.

Consider for a moment, Judas and St. Peter. Both betrayed the Lord in a terrible way, but their final stories ended very differently. Judas died at his own hand in disgrace. In contrast, St. Peter had a renewed encounter with Jesus, was forgiven, reinstated and called again towards greatness.

Satan delights in seeing us fail, but that is not his end-game. He doesn’t just want to see us on the ground, he wants us to stay there. It is at that moment of failure that we have to make a crucial decision. Will we stay down? Will this set back be an end or a beginning? Will this failure be used for our ultimate downfall or will it be used for our sanctification and the greater glory of God?

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. – 2 Corinthians 4:8-10