The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time.
You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. Psalm 145:14-16
Yesterday on my way to church I heard someone recounting a time her family bought her a robot vacuum cleaner to help free up some of her time. She thought she was going to be able to get so much more done. But she found herself, “helping” it clean. If it looked like it was going to get stuck, she’d move it. If it was going to miss a piece of dirt, she would clean it up. This went on for quite some time until one day her daughter saw her and asked what she was doing. Her answer, “helping it clean”, to which her daughter responded, it has artificial intelligence and when it makes a mistake it remembers it and doesn’t do it anymore. She said she was stunned and thought, if I was only as smart as my vacuum.
The truth is we are smarter, because our intelligence comes from God and we too can learn from our mistakes. It wasn’t that the robot vacuum wasn’t ever going to make more mistakes, it just was that it learned from the ones it made not to repeat them. When we take the time to consider our mistakes and take them to the Lord for help, we too are less likely to repeat them. But more important we will learn from them lessons that will help us in other instances. Embrace your mistakes, consider the consequences, learn what you could have done differently and when presented with the occasion to repeat it, remember what you learned. And you don’t have to do it alone, the Lord will help you.
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