Check out these inspirational facts from the Web site Find Your Wings!
- Admiral Robert Peary attempted to reach the North Pole seven times before he made it. . . .
- In its first 28 attempts to send rockets into space, NASA had 20 failures.
- As a young man, Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star Newspaper because his boss told him he lacked creativity!
- In 1962, four nervous young musicians played their first record audition for the executives of the Decca Recording Company. Unfortunately the musicians failed to impress. Turning them down, one executive said, “We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.” The group was called The Beatles.
- A school boy was scolded by his teacher for not paying attention to his mathematics and for not being able to solve simple problems. She told him he would not become anybody of importance. The boy was Albert Einstein.
- When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over 10,000 experiments before he got it to work. A young reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times. He said, “I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 10,000-step process.”
- In 1954, a singer was fired by his manager Jimmy Denny after one performance. He was told, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.” He went on to become the most popular singer in America: Elvis Presley.
- When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he made a demonstration call to President Rutherford Hayes and was told, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”[ref]“Inspirational Facts,” Find Your Wings, http://www.findyourwings.co.uk/inspirational-facts-quotations/ (accessed October 15, 2012).[/ref]
I have felt the frustration of setbacks many times. Have you? They can devastate life like a flood. But such seasons have come to pass for a greater purpose. Just think of Jesus Christ. By all accounts, His life seemed like a failure—33 years of misunderstanding, judgment, abuse, betrayal, and finally, a criminal’s death. But we know Jesus had to pass through the darkness of death to make God’s gift of eternal life possible.
Often, many of our human hopes and dreams die before we put them into God’s hands. But entrusting these dreams to God requires that we deny ourselves and hold on to God alone. I have observed four essential steps we must take as we die to self and pursue new life in Christ.
- We must purify our motives.
- We must solidify our direction.
- We must trust God’s process of sanctification.
- We must view life from God’s perspective.
Fellow traveler, what circumstances in your life have seemed like wasted setbacks or ultimate failures? Write them down and ask the Lord to direct your focus to His transforming work in your heart. In time, you will realize that His ways have been right all along.
And I would love to hear how you have found renewed hope through this process.