Fatal  Flaws

By Larry Doyle Crenshaw

MeditationsInLight.Blogspot.com

Of all the most foolish and fatal flaws

Being quick to do bad and slow to do good

Are a combination that gives heaven pause

As often, we fail to do the good we should

The older we get and the more experience we have, we become more sensitive and attuned to what are called fatal flaws.  These are deeply destructive behaviors we usually know about, but find so difficult to manage or remove.  Some, rather than seek help to eliminate them, spend their lives and energies covering and concealing them with layers of compensating behaviors – hiding them from others and sometimes, with enough doses of denial – from themselves.  It is a condition from which none of us are immune and for which most of us have some personal experience.  Hence, the need for persistent vigilance, faithful diligence, and humble teachableness.

Fatal flaws may be found in our character, our ethics, our management of relationships, or our business or management acumen. And, by definition, if they are fatal flaws, they will be destructive to our patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting at significant life-moments.

These are not those pesky, negative, and minor personality imperfections that we find a nuisance, but generally benign.  Neither do we refer to mental health impediments arising from our DNA and bio-chemical influences which cause our ever-so-temporal vessel to be sometimes fractured or broken.  These may be addressed by medicinal, behavioral, and spiritual remedies that remediate, moderate, or by gracious tender mercies that enlarge our capacity to manage and endure.

The fatal flaws of which we speak are often learned and reinforced throughout our life, but, even they are subject to remedial cures when we find the correct prescription.  These particular flaws run deep, even into the fabric of our soul, and when they do, our spiritual life may unravel and spiral downward.

The good news is that even these fatal flaws are subject to the life-saving, the life-restoring medicine of Jesus’s Atonement.  This week’s meditative verse focuses on addressing our spiritual fatal flaws and prayerfully pleads that we may be:

Quick to accept God’s kind courtesies

Quick to abandon the vile and the vain

Quick to obtain God’s tender mercies

Quick thru heaven’s gate to live and reign

Fatal Flaws

O how foolish, and how vain, and how evil, and devilish, and how quick to do iniquity, and how slow to do good, are the children of men; yea, how quick to hearken unto the words of the evil one, and to set their hearts upon the vain things of the world!

5  Yea, how quick to be lifted up in pride; yea, how quick to boast, and do all manner of that which is iniquity; and how slow are they to remember the Lord their God, and to give ear unto his counsels, yea, how slow to walk in wisdom's paths!

Book of Mormon   Helaman 12:4-6

Of all the most foolish and fatal flaws

Being quick to do bad and slow to do good

Are a combination that gives heaven pause

As often, we fail to do the good we should

O that we be not:

Quick to reject good works – believing them a bother

Slow to turn away from worthless and useless things

Quick to follow Lucifer, the evil son of the Father

Slow to forsake sin and the baggage it brings

And,

Slow to walk in God’s straight path

Slower yet to see our awful condition

Quick to evoke God’s rage and wrath

Quicker yet to shadow the Son of Perdition

O that we might be:

Quick to embrace God’s will

Slow to engage the sorrows of sin

Quick to serve others with Godly skill

Slow to join the evil and worldly din

And,

Quick to accept God’s kind courtesies

Quick to abandon the vile and vain

Quick to obtain God’s tender mercies

Quick thru heaven’s gate to live and reign

Larry Doyle Crenshaw