I had six good months and then I slipped last week. It feels like the whole stretch was fake and I am back at zero.

“For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.”

Proverbs is a collection of hard-won observations about how life actually works, gathered for young people stepping into adult responsibility. This line is not a promise that good people never fall; it assumes they will, repeatedly. What distinguishes them is not an unbroken record but the getting up. Seven falls and seven recoveries still belong to the same person, and the counting is deliberate.

“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

Paul wrote this under house arrest to a church that knew his history, including the years he spent violently attacking the movement he later led. He does not pretend the past is unreal; he says he refuses to live inside it. Forgetting here means declining to relitigate what is behind you every single morning. Direction of travel matters more than distance already covered.