Good morning, My Dear Friends,
Wallace Hamilton tells an old story about a Chinese landowner who had a very large estate. One day some wild horses wandered onto his property. The horses were worth a fortune. The neighbors gathered to congratulate him on his good luck. The man stoically remarked, “How do you know I am lucky?” Later the man’s son was trying to break one of the horses. The boy was thrown and his leg broken. The neighbors tried to console the man on his misfortune. He asked again, “How do you know I have been misfortunate?” A while later the king declared war, and the landowner’s son was exempted from military duty because of his broken leg. The neighbors came in to say how fortunate the man was. He asked the same question: “How do you know I am fortunate?”
How do we really know when we have had a good day? All of us have looked back on some happy experiences which seemed good at the time. But those experiences have turned out to not all be quite so happy. We have had some bad days, but far down the road we have been compelled to say, “It seemed terrible at the time; but as I look back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Time turns a lot of failures into successes. The fact is, you never really know when you have failed.
History is full of this kind of thing. Columbus, looking for a new route to India, failed in his intended mission but unintentionally opened a new world. In 1872, a severe hot spell in California shriveled a farmer’s entire grape crop. He sent his dried-up grapes to a grocer who advertised them as “Peruvian delicacies.” They sold at a good price, and we have been eating raisins ever since.
We may need some new standards by which to measure success. Genuine success is not climbing to the top and staying there. I know a lot of people who have arrived, but they aren’t very happy. Success is doing what you can, with what you have, where you are. People who succeed can look back at life and not be ashamed of what they see. No one who can do that is a failure!
Failure is often success when seen from a different point of view,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
