If at First You Don't Succeed Don't Tell Your Mother-in-Law
There are many creations/inventions of the last two hundred years that help define Americans as what we are today . . . mostly spoiled, whiny brats. Some favorites on the list are the cotton gin, invisible tape (so named because we can never find it when we need it), gun racks, spray butter, cars in the driveway on concrete blocks, portable outhouses, automobiles the size of train engines, fake deer on the front lawn, and a nose hair trimmer. Numbers one and two on the list are soybean burgers and burping Tupperware lids.
Of course I’m kidding. Everyone knows we could not do without lights, electricity, telephones, and the flushable vehicle spittoon. Without lights we could not put up Christmas decorations in September which means that the only thing to be lit at Christmas would be your brother-in-law. Without electricity there would be no stereos, video games, Internet, or televisions, and we would have to actually communicate with our children. Without telephones we would have no way to call in late for work and the only way to spread gossip would be face to face.
The flushable vehicle spittoon was invented so southern grandmothers would have someplace to spit while they are driving. This replaces the original design of a styrofoam cup with a paper towel lining the bottom . . . of the cup, not the grandmother. I don’t spit, and my only requirement for a spitting passenger is that the window be down. We have Thomas Edison to thank for lights and for going farther with electricity. Of course nobody remembers that Edison failed many times before he came up with the right combination of parts and gizmos to perfect the light bulb.
It took ten thousand different failed experiments before he found success. He couldn’t figure out why the bulb would not stay on for very long. He eventually discovered that his teenage daughter never turned the light off when she left the room. Alexander Graham Bell went through many failed experiments before he invented the telephone. Everyone knows the conversation that ensued on that historic day. Bell: “Watson, come here. I need you!” Watson: “If you’d like to place a call, please hang up and dial the operator.”
Success is wonderful and reassuring but besides death and taxes, each one of us is going to face failure at some point in our lives. How did you manage in the past? Are you better prepared to deal with it in the present? Your daughter fails to make the cheerleading squad or your son fails to make all-state band. You fail to get that promotion at work you thought you deserved.
We learn from characters in the Bible that we can’t let failure keep us down. David failed God in the Old Testament. He came back. Paul started out as a persecutor of Christians. He came back as a defender of the faith. About moving on Paul says in Philippians 3:13, “ . . . but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press on . . .”
Make your failures building blocks, not stumbling blocks. If Edison had stopped after his first failure we may never have seen electric light. If God had stopped with His failure in Adam and Eve we never would have seen Jesus, the Light of the world.