What Girls Get Wrong

"...Who among us doesn't have sin or discouragement? Who among us doesn't fail? There are a million things we don't want to let anybody know about us, but He knows them all. And He is not discouraged about us..." ~ K.P. Yohannan, founder, Gospel for Asia Confession time: I am an overachiever. And while there are a lot of good things that can be said for having that kind of drive, it can also be a very dangerous thing. Being an overachiever means that, if I fail at something, or if I don't get something done on my to-do-list, I feel like I've failed for that day. It doesn't matter if I got five other things done which were really important. I'm unhappy with myself for not getting that one little thing done. For almost the whole month of July, dipping into August, I've been struggling with some health issues, and looking back on it, I feel like this area of my life is what God was trying to teach me about. There have been so many days these...

I love the week between Christmas and New Year's. I mean, absolutely, positively, LOVE it. It's a week I usually spend cleaning (yeah, I love cleaning, it's weird, you can say it), getting a last few things done, and of course spending time with my family and friends. It's a time of dreaming, planning new goals for the year ahead, and just taking time to realize how far I've come over the past twelve months. Basically, I love the new start. All the times I failed over the past year are about to be shoved behind me as a brand new year breaks forth. A new year to go places, meet new people, to set new goals and reach them, a chance to try again on the goals I missed the year before. A new year to grow in my relationship with Jesus Christ. To become more like Him. To know Him better, to learn to trust Him more as He works in my life to bring me to where He wants me to be. You may have heard about a book in the Bible called Lamentations. It's not preached from...

Let me tell you about the day, a couple of weeks ago, when I failed. Miserably failed. Failed so greatly, so completely, that if they gave out awards for failing, I'd have won grand grand grand ultra-grand prize hands down. If failing was a martial art, I'd be the master sensei of failure, on the level of failing Ooguay from Kung Fu Panda was with kung fu. I wrote the book The Zen of Failing .* I submitted a form wrong for my internship. Yeah, I'm being ridiculous (I get like that a lot). But I know I can't be the only one who does this. We beat ourselves up over the smallest thing, over and over and over. We make a tiny, teeny, ant-sized mistake (like forgetting someone's name), and we act like it's the apocalypse of failure, and we can never come back from it. And while I'm not saying we shouldn't be sorry, that mistakes are cool, we often lose sight of the fact that it's not the end of the world. And that's the case even for si...