How to Stop Making Mistakes About Making Mistakes

 MISSING THE POINT ABOUT MISTAKES

Well, I love it when I know that the topic of the day is something that touches everyone and that’s what we have today because we are talking about making mistakes. 

So, the issue isn’t whether we make mistakes or not but how we look at what’s happened and how we respond.  What’s that look like for you?

Trying to be perfect is a mean task master yet many of us live in the fear of making mistakes and hide in shame and destructive attitudes and behaviour when we stumble.

Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

Proverbs 11:2

Mistakes are a part of life.  We’ve all heard the examples of famous people.Thomas Edison failed 100 times before he finally got the light bulb right.  Henry Ford went broke 5 times before he successfully manufactured and sold cars.  Michael Jordan missed more than 9000 shots during his famous basketball career, including 26 times he was given the ball at the last second of the game and missed. Their lives echo what we read in the Bible.  They learned from their mistakes and we can too.

Even if good people fall seven times, they will get back up.

Proverbs 24:16a

To learn from our mistakes means we look at what we have done wrong and think about how we might improve in future efforts. 

And even better, we want to try to avoid as many mistakes in the first place as we can by being humble and asking for help when we actually don’t know something

One simple pitfall that can help us avoid making mistakes is to avoid distractions and give our full attention to what we are doing. 

However, there’s not a day that goes by that we don’t need to take time to reflect on a task or on our day and see what went right, what went wrong, and then take action to make things right where that’s needed. 

Well Lord, we admit that the worst thing we can do when we make a mistake is to pretend it never happened.  All our blustering or sneaking around won’t fix things. 

Help us today to be those who are quick to admit our mistakes, but also to build on lessons learned and then get active and try, and try again, until we get things right.  Amen

Well the good news is that no matter how many mistakes we make, when we hand them to God, He works for good in our lives, even through them.