Men do not like to fail. We find much of our identity in our ability to not be a failure. Yet, if we are honest, our spiritual lives are often characterized by the very thing we dread—failure. Our resolutions and our aspirations simply do not align with reality. Habitual sins plague us and enslave us, leading to shame, confessions that are numbingly identical, discouragement bordering on despair, self-loathing, and worse still, doubt—a terrible, nagging doubt that maybe the sacraments don’t really “work.”
