doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

A comment left by grover173 in LiveJournal’s ljbahai community:

Educating one’s self to knowing how the laws help us, learning to follow them–even some of the ones you don’t agree with–is definitely a long learning experience and a path towards spiritual maturity. It is not fair to expect Baha’is to keep every law every day. The only perfect Baha’i, after all, was ‘Abdu’l-Baha. The rest of us will fall short no matter how hard we try; it’s not the falling short that we should avoid, it’s the not striving to understand why we sometimes fall.

And here’s a related quote from Mary Pickford:

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.

Lastly, here’s a quote from the Writings of Baha’u'llah on the subject of striving:

O My servants! My holy, My divinely ordained Revelation may be likened unto an ocean in whose depths are concealed innumerable pearls of great price, of surpassing luster. It is the duty of every seeker to bestir himself and strive to attain the shores of this ocean, so that he may, in proportion to the eagerness of his search and the efforts he hath exerted, partake of such benefits as have been pre-ordained in God’s irrevocable and hidden Tablets. (Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 326)