2:12 a.m. - 2008-04-06
Failure,...What a wonderful thing.
Life is full of learning opportunities. Seeing those opportunities and understanding what they are, when they confront us, builds our character and wisdom. I believe that many of the hardships we face are the best learning opportunities we could ask for, and we often do ask for them we just don't realize it. Ask yourself, How many times have you prayed for strength and or wisdom? I know that I have many times in my 29 years, and most of the time I don't immediately emerge from my knees the stronger wiser person that I asked to be when I fell to them minutes earlier. I'm not saying that the lord doesn't provide comfort and answers to our prayers. I'm just simply saying that like Alanis Morissette's "jagged little pill", the answers to our prayers may not always go down as smooth and easy as we would like them to. Failure is often a wonderful thing. Failure humbles us and forces us to re-evaluate and re-approach. Instant success teaches us very little about ourselves. However, success that has been realized through failings is the sweetest of life's rewards. Fear of hardship and failure stifles our intellectual, physical, and spiritual progress on this earth. Teddy Roosevelt said it best, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." Personally I feel that I have lived in that gray twilight much more in my 29 years than I should have, and now I endeavor to step out of it into the perilous path of hardship and failure so that I may know true victory.
