Fail-Safe

Many complex systems have built in fail-safes. A fail-safe does not make a system immune to failure, but rather, it ensures that when a failure occurs, the system as a whole remains relatively safe. For example, during a power surge, the fuses in the breaker box might blow and in doing so, they prevent the power surge from destroying all of the other wires in the electrical system. Fail-safes exist because we understand that failures are inevitable and we also understand that if failures cannot be avoided, at least we can work to improve the system so that any failures that occur don't end in disaster. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the gospel of repentance, we have all been provided with fail-safes in our lives. By living our lives in such a way that we are continually seeking the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost by obeying the Lord's commandments and honoring our covenants, especially by partaking of the sacrament weekly, and immediately seeking forgiveness when we have sinned, we build in fail-safes to our lives so that any failures we experience will have minimal impact on our eternal progression. The Lord knows what our weaknesses are and He wants to help us engineer our lives so that we can turn our weakness into strengths. In this way we can go from failure to failure without losing our momentum and our forward progression. I know that if we continue working with the Lord, He will not necessarily help us to fail less, but He will help to make sure that our failures hurt less in the long run.