Article December 7, 2009 Issue

Moving past mistakes

BY TOM BLACK

It's natural for us to feel good about ourselves, to feel a sense of self-worth and value. Not an inflated ego or an exaggerated sense of some human talent. Actually, that's often a cover for some fear. But it's right to appreciate ourselves as reflections of God and expressions of His qualities.

The grand fact is that all the good God is, He manifests through each of His offspring. Rightly seen, each of us is one of those offspring. The place we occupy is a spiritual location for a divine idea, an active expression of all the good God is. Spiritually speaking, everybody's perfect, a divine idea. As the saying goes, "It doesn't get any better than that."

But sometimes it seems to get a lot worse than that. Humanly speaking, nobody's perfect. We all appear to make mistakes. They may be silly slips like blurting out an unkind comment. Or they could be more serious wrongs, like premeditated stealing or immorality. Sometimes they're single events; other times they can become chronic. And at times they are insidious lies imposed on us by popular beliefs such as that we don't measure up to some popular standard of beauty or talent.