Goodness gracious it’s been a while. QFYC has been on our hearts a lot lately, and the sad truth is that we’ve been focusing our attention on growing other aspects of our business and life, while QFYC has slowly been put on the backburner.

Not only is this not fair to our own mental health and happiness, it’s not fair to you.

This community was created out of our own need – a need to be surrounded by a community of twenty and thirty-somethings who are looking for more out of life.  To connect with others who think a little differently. To share our struggles right along with our successes. And most importantly, to hopefully empower others to live out their lives according to who they were created to be.

Slowly but surely, we’ve started to see the impacts of this intentional search in our lives. We’ve seen the kind of people we aspire to be like walk into our lives. We’ve connected with others we never would’ve imagined. We have taken more risks and opened ourselves up to our own vulnerability and fears.

Yet in the process, we allowed our focus to shift away from a huge purpose we had (and still have!) for QFYC: creating a community of Millennials who are looking to reconnect with themselves, their faith, and the world around them.

And while this site has been live for a while and we’ve continued sharing thoughts and resources in our monthly newsletter (don’t receive this little piece of inspiration? click here to subscribe!), we’ve done a pretty stinky job at staying consistent on here. For those of you who follow our journeys on our personal pages, you may recognize that we’ve been trying to make a significant effort to live out our purpose for QFYC (and our lives) on our personal feeds.

Nevertheless, it pains me when I realize how little attention and focus we’ve given to QFYC.

This brings me to two points for today’s post:

 1. We fail (a lot) and we’re still learning

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since starting Quarter for Your Crisis is to embrace failure, rather than running from it. Failure isn’t fun, and it certainly isn’t easy. But you know what’s crazy? The more we acknowledge our failure – and allow ourselves to learn from it – the more we grow.

If we never failed, we wouldn’t grow. It’s as simple as that.

We’ve learned that failure is one of the best teachers. It’s a voice that causes you to take a step back and reevaluate your life and decisions.

Before writing this post, I was throwing myself a bit of a pity party about failing this community. And then I thought – so what? I’ve been slacking on this blog, slacking on growing this community, and slacking on creating the time for myself that we so passionately emphasize on this little corner of the internet. There’s no changing the past – the key here is what I’m going to do about it moving forward.

The truth is our day-to-day lives more accurately reflect our priorities more than we’d like to believe.

If I want to prioritize my down time, prioritize my writing, prioritize QFYC, then these things need to have a very real and active place in my calendar.

So today, first and foremost, I challenge you to reflect on your own priorities. What do you want to do with your life? And what are you doing each and every day to get there?

 2. We can’t create a community alone.

We learned this lesson a long time ago, but it couldn’t be more true now. Thankfully, Quarter for Your Crisis brought an amazing soul into our lives. We met our former-interned turned Community Manager, Sara, online. She had written an article that so deeply resonated with me that I decided to reach out – in a tweet!

What’s crazy about this is I rarely use Twitter. I have no idea what prompted me to do this, but I have to believe that action was 100% guided by the Holy Spirit. By some crazy chance, Sara responded saying her inspiration was drawn from Quarter for Your Crisis! At that point, I seriously didn’t think anyone was reading our blog except for some family and friends. On top of that, Sara was attending college in Pete’s hometown, and we were able to connect with her further in person.

All this goes to say that from the very beginning, this was never about Pete and me. This is a community, and as such, we cannot do it alone. We are so very thankful for people like Sara who have been in our corner, supporting and nurturing and loving this community as much as we have (and sometimes more than us!).

I’ll end with this: if you have been sitting by, watching, reading, or wondering about this little nook of the Internet and want to get more involved, we’d love to expand our community. We so adamantly believe in surrounding ourselves with like-minded Degenerates who are out to change their own lives and the lives around them. If this sounds like you, we would love to meet you. Shoot us a message! We’re looking to expand this community in new ways and we’ve love to leverage the talents of our community to do so.

With that, I hope if you gain anything from this message it’s this: failing helps us focus.

Or perhaps refocus in our case. I pray that these thoughts may resonate with some of the struggles or journeys you may be going on and encourage you to keep pushing through. Maybe you need to change some things up. Maybe you need to shift some priorities around. Maybe you need to link arms with others.

Whatever it is, we’d love to hear your thoughts as well. Let’s get a conversation started – I encourage you to leave a comment below reflecting on your own failures and lessons you’ve learned (or are still learning!) from them.