//The Fear of Failure: Learning to be the 1%//

You ever feel like everything you do is failure? No matter how hard you try, you just can't write that one chapter, take that one certain type of picture, or paint a certain thing. You feel as if you've failed every creative bone in your body. You feel like you'll never amount to anything special... The future is freakishly close to choking you and all those dreams you had a child seem to fade as you black out into the routines and business of adulthood. It's getting harder and harder to recover from failure.

Sometimes I write chapters three or four times. Or five or six drafts before I think it is out of the "rough" draft. Many authors do ten, eleven, twelve drafts before considering to get is published. Nothing is ever wrong with that, however, when they send it in to get it looked into for publishing and all they get back is rejection letters, it hurts. Of course it does. The thing is not to feel like a failure. To realize something like that is just an obstacle to overcome.

Finding Hope In Spite of the Pain and Illness

I know it's Sunday and I post on Thursdays, but this was kind of impromptu and I already have a post planned for Thursday, so you get double the posts this week.

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It's taken me a while to talk myself into this. I don't like talking about it, or putting it out in the open. Perhaps it's pride, or the fact that I don't like people saying "sorry". And that's not what this post is for. It isn't for people to feel bad. It's for me to help you. It's for me to try to spread a little bit of Jesus' love and some hope. So bare with me.

Walk with me for a second. We're in a forest in early fall. The leaves are changing colors, some of them already falling down. Some are barely holding onto the branches, clinging for dear life. Oh, look how they try not to let the wind knock them down. Brilliant, isn't it? (Unless you live in the mid-west and have no idea what trees with leaves are... :P) Look at the sky. It's gray, tinged with the last burning sunlight of the day. The clouds are dark with the October rains... But with rain, comes wind. With rain comes flooding. With rain comes dark clouds and lightning bolts. With rain comes rainbows.

We're all attached to the same tree. Sounds kind of Epic, does it not? There's one big tree of life. And we are the leaves. Each one of us. We're all going through things that change us; shape us into who we become. We might end up a different "color" by the end of it all, or we could end up half dead, hanging onto that branch for dear life. There are many fallen leaves below, but there are still leaves on the tree. There are still billions of lives out there just trying to hang on.

Hope Through Everything

Hope.
It's a word we use all the time in the most very wrong ways. "I hope I make it home safe..." "I hope I get that scholarship I need for college..." "I hope I don't fail this test.

We use the word hope as if it's an expendable thing. We use it too often. We use it in ways that it doesn't really mean. Hope is the action after faith. You believe, therefore you are hoping. This world uses hope as if it's just another word. Like love. It's used too much.