Radical Grace/the Lutheran Difference

The difference between the definitions of the word "faith" that many churches and church bodies have adopted are extremely subtle.  On the one hand, many people take faith as "being optimistic", having a good attitude and such.  I remember years ago I had one of my first bosses tell me "attitude is everything", and he pretty much expected his employees to live and work by that advice.  Being young, in my very early twenties, I had no idea that life would come along and dash that advice to pieces.  Failure often comes even when we sincerely believe we'll succeed.I recently looked at an article on Wikipedia on Fear, and there was some interesting information listed there.  The single most surprising thing I found was that teenagers these days fear, in order of most important, the following things:  terrorist attacks, spiders, death, being a failure...  being a failure?  They actually fear failure!  It's second only to death, and if we could examine the raw data I'm sure we would find that it's actually second o