Successes and Failures

"I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty." Paul (Philippians, 4:12)

In each social community there are numerous people that are overly preoccupied with their individual success, anxiously awaiting the opportunity for recognition. They are precisely the ones who do not maintain these distinguished positions for long, when invited to the most prestigious posts in the world, disastrously ruining the opportunity of elevation that life has conferred to them.

Those who have learned to live in poverty are usually the ones who know how to manage their material resources more effectively.

For this reason, accumulated treasures in the hands of he who did not work for it, often is the cause of crimes, separatism and confusion.

Honest hard working parents shall create in the minds of their sons a mentality of personal effort and affective cooperation; while, the selfish and uncaring parents will foster uselessness and laziness in their descendants.

The lesson given by Paul of Tarsus in the church of the Philippians refers to the precious and indispensable lesson on the path with regards to equilibrium, demonstrating the need of the disciple regarding the value of poverty and of good fortune, of scarcity and of abundance.

The success and failure are two distinct cups filled with diverse elements that serve the same sublime finality. Human ignorance, however, finds in the first, the liquor of intoxication, and in the second, it identifies the bile for desperation. This is precisely the point where the profound error lies, because the wise person will extract from happiness and pain, from abundance or from scarcity, the Divine contents.

XAVIER, Francisco Cândido. Our Daily Bread. By the Spirit Emmanuel. Spititist Alliance for Books, 2003. Chapter 56.