Have you come to realize yet that you are no more perfect in 2006 than you were in 2005? Just remember, “He who never makes a mistake, never makes anything.”
If anybody is boasting about how perfect they are, chances are its because they haven’t tried to accomplish anything of value lately.
Even the best of us sometimes trip when we walk and fall when we run. But that doesn’t make us a failure – it just means we are human. A failure is not somebody who gets it wrong every now and then.
A failure is somebody who never cares enough to keep trying until they get it right. I think perspective plays a huge part in what we allow our mistakes to do to us
An individual can either surrender to their flaws and allow them to do him or her in or they can actually become a student of the flops and learn from them for their good.
A football coach gave this advice on how to deal with failures. He said, “When you’re about to be run out of town, get out in front and make it look like you are heading a parade.” The great Will Rogers stage specialty act used to consist of him doing rope tricks. One day while he was on stage, right in the middle of his act, his rope got quite messed up. Instead of getting upset, he drawled, “It ain’t so bad to get all tangled up in a rope as long as isn’t wrapped around your neck.”
The audience roared with laughter. Encouraged by the warm reception, Rogers began adding humorous comments to all of his performances. And as you know, it was his witty comments and not his rope tricks that he would go on to be most remembered for.
Have you ever known somebody who had an immense amount of talent, but they also had a bad case of unhealthy perfectionism and because they set their standard to such the level that the only way they could have achieved it was if they were infallible, they gave up and we can only guess what might have been? There is the story about a fellow minister who couldn’t get it through his head that God didn’t call him because he had it all together, but because he was willing to serve the Lord who was able to put the broken things back together as they were meant to be.
He got so discouraged one day that he actually wheeled into the church parking lot in a borrowed pick up truck. He proceeded to back up the truck right across the church front lawn to his office window.
Refusing comment or assistance from some very curious onlookers, he began to empty his desk and toss the contents out the window into the back of the truck. He was impassive and systematic. First came the desk, then the files, and last his vast library of books and all of it was tossed carelessly into a heap as if it was useless rubbish. When his task was done, the pastor left the church and drove some miles to the local city dump where he discarded everything into the waiting garbage. It was his way of putting behind him the overwhelming sense of failure and loss that he had experienced in the ministry.
This young, gifted minister was determined that he had to be faultless to be in the pulpit. Because he lost a proper vision, he never risked entering a church again, and who knows how many wonderful experiences went unlived because this man quit.
One major league baseball player actually holds the record for striking out an embarrassing 1,316 times. That is an awful lot of three strikes in one man’s lifetime. This guy actually struck out five straight times in a World Series Game.
You might get the impression that this was one terrible ballplayer. You might think that he would have been picked last to be on your team.
And then again you might be wrong because if I offered you a chance to have Babe Ruth in your line-up. you’d grab it. Then there is the tale of the songwriter who didn’t even know how to read music. He was so bad that he had to hum his melodies to a secretary who would write down the notes. What was this inept musician’s name? You might have heard of Irving Berlin.
I close with this wonderful quote and I hope it challenges you today to realize that if you have taken a spill in the middle of the highway, it is always God’s will for you to never give up but simply to get back up.
John Gardner says it this way, “One of the reasons that mature people stop growing and learning is because they become less and less willing to risk failure.”
May you never get used to failure but then again, may you never get tired of it either. Remember, no perfect people allowed. God bless as you run the race with all your heart this week.
You can hear Pastor Rudy daily on South Jersey’s Praise FM, WJPG 88.1 and WJPH 89.9 as he hosts Real Life Radio heard at 8 a.m. and again at 5 p.m. Call 465-6690 for more information.
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