Mistakes are a fact of life. Learning to skillfully play the piano is essentially impossible without making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million. To learn a foreign language, one must face the embarrassment of making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million. Even the world’s greatest athletes never stop making mistakes.
“Success,” it has been said, “isn’t the absence of failure, but going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.”
With his invention of the light bulb, Thomas Edison purportedly said, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” Charles F. Kettering called failures “finger posts on the road to achievement.” Hopefully, each mistake we make becomes a lesson in wisdom, turning stumbling blocks into stepping-stones.
We may wonder—if both Nephi and Moses were on the Lord’s errand, why didn’t the Lord intervene and help them achieve success on their first try? Why did He allow them—and why does He allow us—to flounder and fail in our attempts to succeed? Among many important answers to that question, here are a few:
- The Lord knows that “these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good.”
- To allow us to “taste the bitter, that [we] may know to prize the good.”
- To prove that “the battle is the Lord’s,” and it is only by His grace that we can accomplish His work and become like Him.
- To help us develop and hone scores of Christlike attributes that cannot be refined except through opposition and “in the furnace of affliction.”
So, amid a life full of stumbling blocks and imperfection, we all are grateful for second chances.
In 1970, as a new freshman at BYU, I enrolled in a beginning course on the essentials of physics taught by Jae Ballif, an outstanding professor. After finishing each unit of the course, he would administer an exam. If a student received a C and wanted a better grade, Professor Ballif would allow the student to take a modified exam covering the same material. If the student received a B on the second attempt and was still unsatisfied, he or she could take the test a third time and a fourth, and so on. By allowing me numerous second chances, he helped me excel and finally earn an A in his class.
Allowing unlimited chances to retake an exam is a good instructional technique.
Knowing that the strait and narrow path would be strewn with trials and that failures would be a daily occurrence for us, the Savior paid an infinite price to give us as many chances as it would take to successfully pass our mortal probation. The opposition which He allows can often seem insurmountable and almost impossible to bear, yet He doesn’t leave us without hope.
To keep our hope resilient as we face life’s trials, the Savior’s grace is ever ready and ever present. His grace is a “divine means of help or strength, … an enabling power that allows men and women to lay hold on eternal life and exaltation after they have expended their own best efforts.” His grace and His loving eye are upon us throughout our entire journey as He inspires, lightens burdens, strengthens, delivers, protects, heals, and otherwise “succor[s] his people,” even as they stumble along the strait and narrow path.
Repentance is God’s ever-accessible gift that allows and enables us to go from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Repentance isn’t His backup plan in the event we might fail. Repentance is His plan, knowing that we will. This is the gospel of repentance, and as President Russell M. Nelson has observed, it will be “a lifetime curriculum.”
Remembering repentance is the plan is critical to maintaining hope.
“Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”
Obviously, the Savior was not establishing an upper limit of 490. That would be analogous to saying that partaking of the sacrament has a limit of 490, and then on the 491st time, a heavenly auditor intercedes and says, “I’m so sorry, but your repentance card just expired—from this point forward, you’re on your own.
If there were and upper limit of 490 then considering that we are expected to partake of the sacrament weekly after we are baptized at age 8, the Lord would be planning for us to be perfected by 18. Life contact reminds us that the Lord has hardly begun the testing by that point.
Concerning change, consider this simple insight: “Things that don’t change remain the same.” This obvious truth isn’t meant to insult your intelligence but is the profound wisdom of President Boyd K. Packer, who then added, “And when we are through changing—we’re through.”
Because we don’t want to be through until we become as our Savior is, we need to continue getting up each time we fall, with a desire to keep growing and progressing despite our weaknesses. In our weakness, He reassures us, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
Only with time-lapse photography or growth charts can we discern our physical growth. Likewise, our spiritual growth is usually imperceptible except through the rearview lens of time. It would be wise to regularly take an introspective look through that lens to recognize our progress and inspire us to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope.”
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