Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Stocks Crash. Cars Crash. Good People Crash

Nobody likes a crash. It’s so much nicer to open up RRSP statements and see all of your investments growing consistently. So yesterday’s stock market crash, (which may be followed by a few aftershocks) wasn’t fun. (I didn’t enjoy the dot-com crash of 2000 either. It took years for my RRSP to dig out of that one.)

But crashes are really part of life. Everything fails, from the newfangled gizmo you just bought at the electronics store to the roof on your house. And everybody fails. The Bible reminds us that there is not a righteous man upon earth who does good and doesn’t sin”. Even the best people crash.

The key point is: You can’t be crushed by crashes. Resilience is critical to goodness. Good intentions are great, but how do you deal with failure? Do you feel guilty, because you are no longer perfect? Are you giving up because you’ve come up short?

The answer to a crash is to keep going. The Bible tells us that goodness is more about resilience than it is about perfection. “A righteous man falls down seven times and stands up again, but a wicked man stumbles under adversity”. Giving up hope is a terrible evil.

I love Winston Churchill’s wonderful proverb: “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”. So for all of us worrying about crashes of every kind, remember that crashes are just a speed bump on the road of life.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I felt this to be very uplifting. It is a great reminder to keep ourselves focused on 'trying again' if we do not succeed at first!