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Day 25

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Day 25

Making Failure Work for You

Let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith...Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people; then you won’t become weary and give up. (Hebrews 12:1-3)

Part of what set Michael Jordan apart was his philosophy about being willing to take a risk. As Jordan said:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Babe Ruth struck out almost twice the number of times that he hit a home run, yet he is still considered one of the greats. Abraham Lincoln lost almost every political race he entered, until he was finally elected president of the United States. We’ll fall short. We’ll fall down. We’ll fail. That’s one piece of life advice that we seem to forget to tell young people. So often they are confronted with failure in ways that they didn’t expect. You could tell them the story of Thomas Edison, who went through thousands of experiments before inventing the light bulb. You’d think that Edison must have felt like quitting, giving up on the idea altogether. Instead, he pulled himself out of whatever discouragement that seemed rightly his and pressed on. When things happen to us that aren’t exactly what we had hoped for, there are a number of ways we can respond. But there’s only one response that will help us to move on toward the promise of a new day full of opportunities. Get over it, and try again. Olympian Eric Liddell once said, ”In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.” Get over it, get up, and try again.

UNCOMMON KEY> Is there something you have failed at in the past? Revisit it and try again. Maybe enough time has passed that you have learned a new approach or technique that will help you succeed with this attempt. If you fall into a mud puddle, there isn’t much you can do to make matters worst––unless you stay there.

What is God saying to you right now? Jot down those thoughts and pray them back to Him.

This devotion was taken from: The One Year–UNCOMMON LIFE–Daily Challenge; May 17; by Tony Dungy and Nathan Whitaker