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‘Though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again…’ Proverbs 24:16 NIV

Stand up and take a bow, Winston Churchill. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, Nobel Prize winner and patron of bow ties and bowler hats (ok, the last bit is an exaggeration). Yet when asked what prepared him best for the pressures of leading a country to war, he remembered the time he was made to repeat a year of school.

‘You failed a year at school?’ quizzed the interviewer.

‘I never failed anything,’ he replied. ‘I was given a second opportunity to get it right.’

Our attitude and response to failure is crucial in deciding what we make of our lives. Failing isn’t falling down, it’s staying down. With God’s help, we can keep on getting back up again. Still, it takes guts and grit. Stan Smith was considered so uncoordinated and clumsy that he wasn’t accepted as a ball boy for a Davis Cup tennis match. Stan tried harder than ever to become coordinated and eventually won eight Davis Cup matches as a player.

Mistakes and ‘failures’ are part of daring to live the kind of life Jesus lived on earth—full of excitement and even potential danger. The other option is to drift through life, living a ‘safe existence’ and never taking a single risk. The choice is ours.

So, ask yourself: Is failure when things don’t work out the way we hoped or expected? Or is failure not having the courage to risk living out our dreams?

SoulFood: Eph 1:1–4:16 John 3:9–21 Ps 89:1–14 Pro 23:10–14

word4today an adaptation of The Word For Today is authored by Bob and Debby Gass and published under licence from UCB International Copyright 2024

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