Instructions Before Reading

I stand by the right to publish incomplete snippets. The point of this blog is to share life. If there is a unity in my life, it will become apparent what that unity is. No post is a complete thought, theology, worldview, or poem within itself, it must be taken within the context of the entirety of this blog, considerations of who I am in public as well as who I am in extreme situations like when I am forced to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to help my wife jump start her car in 20 degree weather.

I recognize my right as a flawed human being to do the following: 1) be wrong, 2) change my mind, 3) be inconsistent, 4) have improper grammar and spelling conventions. You are just as flawed, wrong, capricious, and prone to theological alteration as I am... so get over it.

Moving Day

Just a reminder that I've moved to my new site jasonropp.com. I'll still leave old posts up for reference, but no new material will be on this site.

Enjoy!

Moving Day

It has been 218 posts since I started this blog, which my mother compiled for me in paperback form as a graduation present. If you'd like a copy let me know and I can get you one. Otherwise I'll be leaving this sight up for reference in case you want to find an old post. 

I will now be blogging at www.jasonropp.com.


Learning From Each Other

Last post I talked about my own failure, (Click the link to check it out). Now I'm curious.

How do you deal with failure (big or small) in your own life?
Have you failed in a way that produced something beautiful?

I'd love to hear your comments.

Learning to Love Failure.

Perfectionism takes various animal shapes, some more deadly than others. Mine would be a sloth, or maybe an Eeyore; I can't do things as good as I'd like so I don't bother doing them. In school, I typically finished projects by staring at the computer screen for an hour, reassuring myself that if I just turn in the paper, the worst that could happen is that I'd get a low B. It's a bit depressing when you consider almost everything to be failure before you're even finished.

In my world, everything is in some sense failure, it's never perfectly what it should be. Our faith, art, play, and relationships are all typically mediocre. Even the best at anything find critics.

I set a goal recently, to write 2,000 words a day. I'm 0 for 4. Day 1 I got in a solid 1,700. Day 2-3 I was recording guitar all day and didn't write at all. Today I've done about 800, plus however long this blog is. This is all failure to my perfectionist mind.

But even my failure is getting me closer to where I want to be. Failure means I'm trying, it means I'm one step closer to where I want to be.

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