Imagine You Are Watching The Olympics. All ...

Imagine you are watching the Olympics. All these different skaters come out with their impressive performances. Now in the Olympics the athlete will be judged on the difficulty of their routine as well as the precision and grace with which the carry it out. In evaluating then you are looking for the overall quality of performance in seeing how many errors they make as well as how complicated what they are doing really is so then an athlete who attempted a more challenging jump may actually get more points for trying and failing or making a slight mistake than if they didn’t try at all. As a judge then what would you do if one of the skaters came out and just slowly skated in a circle? They took no risks, and didn’t do anything challenging. Sure their performance might have been close to perfect but nothing was noteworthy. Anyone could have done what they did. Often times when we hold on to shame in our lives that is exactly what we do. Rather than trying anything or doing anything we just skate safely around. How would you judge that? Even just watching at home you’d sit there and think really? These others did such incredible routines and all you did was skate in circles, how did you even get in to the Olympics. You certainly wouldn’t say well done. That is the effect that shame has on our spiritual lives. It keeps us trapped in this fear of failure so that we are reluctant or unwilling to do anything.