How many things can break in one week? The list has grown to a humorous length. You know the feeling; you just have to laugh or cry, and laughing is much better. After all, it's just stuff, right?
This morning my sweet husband is out splicing the internet cable after we cut it planting new shrubs. This is his third attempt. He's been working for a week on it. Now, however, he's learned a new fact about cable wires that seems to assure success. He's learned so much about wires this week that he would not have known except for his repeated failures to restore the internet service.
My mother, a brilliant woman who isn't afraid to learn new technology even as she approaches her 80s, installed a new modem for her computer this week. Unfortunately, her lack of mobility caused her to insert her programming CD into the wrong slot on her hard drive. But now she's learned more than she'd ever anticipated because of her failed original attempt at loading the CD.
Last week our satellite dishes (yes, we live way out in the county) were hit by lightning. I tried for days to realign and reprogram them. I learned so much about satellite dishes from all my trials and errors. And, indeed, I finally got the dishes to work, but only after I'd made attempt upon attempt that ended in failure.
I love to be consoled by the famous quotes of successful people from history relating to their own failures and successes. One of my favorite quotations was said by one of my favorite men from history, Sir Winston Churchill, "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." Another favorite comes from Henry Ford, "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely." These great men understood that the only true failure occurs when we give up, when we refuse to try one more time.
I suppose my favorite story of spectacular failures is found in the Scriptures. It is the story of King David. We don't think of him as being a failure because the story of his entire life is one that shows he continued to fall but get back up again. In one of his great poems, Psalm 51, he confesses one his most spectacular failures, that of his affair with the wife of one of his generals, a general David subsequently has murdered. Here David looks his great failure full in its ugly face and vows, with God's great mercy, to rise up from that failure and pursue a successful course of service of sacrificial living according to God's plan, not his own plan:
Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence and take not thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation and uphold me with thy free spirit.
My own failures seldom bring physically broken bones but they often cause emotionally broken bones of heart and mind. But, like King David, I can "hear joy and gladness" as my bones rejoice when I rise from failure and aim once again for success.
Oh, so humorous. When I pushed the button to publish this post, the post simply disappeared. "No connection to the Typepad Server." The posting just disappeared. Another failure! I'm "rejoicing" that I was able to persevere until I pulled back out of the space/time continuum that is the internet.
Posted by: Rhonda | June 27, 2009 at 09:27 AM