Failure and Excellence

Last night, Kyle and I were watching the replay of Dave Ramsey's "Town Hall For Hope" meeting, and we were inspired. Once again! Kyle made the comment that everyone needs to see that event, and you can do so on Dave's Web site. If you already saw it, or do see it, let me know what you think.

We've followed Dave Ramsey's financial principles in the past and have been firmly converted to his way of thinking about money, but we fell away from the highly disciplined attack on our debt through his Financial Peace University protocol several months ago. Since then, we've done it our way, and we're reminded that ours is not God's and will never be successful. We got arrogant and a little sloppy with our money, and now we have some consequences to face. While humbling, it comes at a perfect time when we're rearranging everything in our lives and preparing to sell our home, our greatest liability (at least from a budgetary standpoint). I'm in awe of the timing of it all. In so many ways, what we are going through right now is looking more and more like a 'reset' of our way of life. Not that everything we've chosen over the past decade was bad - I KNOW that's not true. I am just beginning to think that we are being given an opportunity to reprioritize what's important. If I think about things that way, I'm humbled even more at the enormity of that gift...

Anyway, Dave said something during the simulcast event that I had to write down - it was, at least for me, profound. He said: "Failure, if it's chasing you, will run you to excellence."

He also quoted a friend who once told him, "If you are too busy holding on to your lemons, you'll never get into your lemonade."

Some thoughts I'm pondering today...