Once a blind person was begging on a very crowed street. He was sitting on the sidewalk with a hat at his feet and a sign written in white chalk: “please help me, I am blind.” A person who worked in making advertisements passed by and stopped and looked at his hat that only had a few coins in it. Without asking permission, he took the board and wrote something on the other side. He placed the board at the blind man’s feet and said: “now you will probably receive more donations” and left.
In the afternoon, this creative advertiser passed by again and saw the blind man’s hat, which now was pretty full of coins and bills. “Good job!” he said and the blind man who recognized his voice asked: “what did you write on my sign?” The same thing that you wrote but in a different way. I just wrote: “we are in spring and I cannot see it.”
The moral of this story is very simple: “we have to change our strategy when something does not work out as we want.” When something does not work out in our life (particularly in our spiritual life) we usually complain against ourselves: “oh! I am always the same” or “I make the same mistake again, I am stupid” or something like that.
But, if something went wrong, we should try to analyze or examine why it went wrong and make a new strategy in order to be successful. For example, if I promised to pray the Rosary every day and it did not work one day, and it did not work the second day and so on, maybe the problem is my strategy or plan. Or maybe I put an hour of spiritual reading in my schedule at a time when there is a lot of noise, so it is difficult to read at that time and I give up as soon as I hear the noise.
Or the same could happen with our proposals. Some people work on the same proposal for years without any progress. Maybe there is something wrong in their strategy or the means they are using in order to achieve that proposal or reach that goal.
When we examine what is wrong in our lives, we should try to see if the problem is our strategy. Many times, we fight against the right enemy but in the wrong way and we fail in our spiritual combat simply because we do not see what we have to change in our strategy.
