Winning

Zippy Catholic has an interesting post up today about having the proper mindset for victory. The gist of it is that you can't win if you're not prepared to lose.

Victory cannot be had if we aren't truly and genuinely willing to accept losing: to accept actually being a loser. If we can't accept losing then in substance, when we do lose, we will declare victory anyway. Instead of merely losing to that which we oppose we will become what we oppose.

This equates fairly well with something I've told my kids more than once, "If you're acting out of fear, you've already lost."

Or, as Mother Theresa is reported to have said, ""we are not called to be successful, we are called to be faithful"

Fr. Longnecker has a post up today about tolerance and how, when over emphasized, tolerance naturally slides down into tyranny.

This is walking a tightrope. Nobody wants to dispute the fact that tolerance is a virtue, and nobody wants to argue for intolerance, however, there does need to be an ordering of virtue.

Well, I hate to contradict Father, but I'll argue for intolerance any day of the week. We must never tolerate falsehood or dishonesty in public discourse. We should never tolerate our own sinfulness and especially pride. We should not show tolerance for what is contemptible, craven or evil.

Tolerating these things is like tolerating weeds in the garden, it only encourages them. In our locality, our garden is infested with nightshade. It's a beautiful plant, but deadly. Handling the plant without gloves can cause sickness, and ingesting even a small amount of the leaves or berries can kill. It will seed suprisingly quickly if left alone, and likes to hide under other, good plants so that it won't bee seen rooted out and destroyed.

If I were to tolerate this weed, it would soon take over the garden, choking out the good plants, and leaving no harvest but poison and death. Some falsehoods are just as noxious, and just as vigorous, and just as deadly as nightshade.