Failing Forward

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun.





— Ecclesiastes 2:11

Did you know that success can be a form of failure? Some may argue that success is the most important thing in life. After all, there is so much emphasis on it today. But is success the most important thing in life? That all depends on whose definition of success you choose.Many people achieve their goals, but my question is, what did it cost to achieve it? Was it by using deception and betrayal? By abandoning their principles and sacrificing integrity? By neglecting their family and friends? By forgetting about, and in some cases, outright abandoning God?" If so, they may be successful by certain definitions, but ultimately, they're failures.We can do worse than fail. We can succeed and be personally proud of our success. We can succeed and worship the accomplishment rather the One who helped us to reach it. We can succeed and forget whose hand it is that gives and withholds.So sometimes failure can be good, because we can learn from our mistakes. And failure can be good, even when we do something that is wrong . . . if we learn from it, that is, and if we learn to fail forward.By failing forward, I mean that after we have done something wrong and have tasted the bitter results of it, we say, "I really don't want to do that again." So we put safeguards around our lives and take precautionary steps to never fall into that same trap. If that is the case, then we have learned something from our failures.

Trev Carpenter
www.btmcallen.com