BLESSED BY FAILURE

Your last failure may be a part of your next success.
                                                             Debra Kaye

Sometimes we tend to fight the thing that is poised to bless us most.  Mommas monitor this as infants wrestle with trying to go to sleep.  A child learning to swim can discover that one toe seems to be weighted--somehow magnetized--to the bottom of the pool. My guess is that with regularity adults withhold personal adventure and fulfillment while hiding beneath the covers of intimidation.

Discovering what doesn't work increases the percentage of coming upon what does. Failure is only failure if we spell it Q U I T.  To be shut down or shut out has not the final say.  No, we will go to school on the failures quite determined to unearth the potential of successes.

I spent too many years agonizing over my deficits.  Yet within them unfolded a gradual awareness of life-giving blessings; not in spite of them, but because of them.  I must endure my begrudged and personal lack in so many areas so that I may possess an understanding sensitivity toward the masses who also strain from beneath the load of identical burdens.

Failure advantages us.  We will not waste one crumb of disappointment for we will turn frustration into the blessing of better understanding our friends and neighbors.  I wish I were more.  Would maybe 90% of society struggle with similar concerns about themselves that I also face?

The things which choose to disturb us are our magic wands to give hope to a similarly hurting community.  We will not waste our pains; but we will grow from them in order to cheer like-minded people on to victory.

Isn't this why God sent His Son to earth?  To learn what it was like being us?  And didn't Jesus become the perfect Savior because he understands us?  He walked in our sandals before we had feet.  Our calling is to follow him.  To follow him is to do for others what he did for us....understand.

We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.  Let us therefore draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and may find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).