Celebrate Your Failures!

Those of you who may have known me as a younger, inexperienced worshipper may remember the day I made a big "boo boo"...in the middle of the worship.  I was on the grand piano when the train derailed.  I'm not kidding...it all derailed.  I was very inexperienced and nervous too.  The first song on our set list came off without a hitch.  I was feeling pretty good after that.  So with boldness, confidence, and too much focus on my part I barreled into the next song.  Then about 30 seconds into it, the worship leader up front had to stop it all.  It had already gone over the cliff anyway.  You see, what happened was, I started on the 3rd song when the rest of the musicians and singers started in on the 2nd song...just like they were supposed to.  The worship leader simply said something like, "Let's start this train over!"  Was I embarrassed?  Well...I was a couple of heart-beats away from crawling up under the grand piano.  Yes...I qualified for full-blown, humiliating embarrassment...and rightfully so.  We managed to pull everything together for a good, anointed time of Praise and Worship.  I am so grateful to the Holy Spirit for His willingness to anoint and use what otherwise would have been not so useful.  He has a way of changing things!

After the service someone came up to me to console me about my totally un-cover-up-able blunder on the piano.  I don't even remember who it was.  I clearly remember what he said to me though.  He said, "Don't worry.  It was only us.  And besides, that is one less mistake you'll have to make."  That really stuck with me.  What I heard was, "If you can learn from this mistake...you'll never have to make that one again!"  That's how it sounded to me after the words left his lips, traveled through the air, and were filtered through the Holy Spirit filter in me.  I took his words to heart and I still believe they came from the Holy Spirit.

Question:  Have you ever failed?  Have you ever made a mistake?  Today?  Yesterday?  Years ago?  Don't let those mistakes haunt you today.  Make a decision to learn from those mistakes.  I'm convinced we don't make all our mistakes because we are imperfect.  God engineered life so that many of our mistakes can be opportunities to learn how to do it right.  Failures can be impressionable object lessons to teach us how to do things correctly and in line with His will.  Some people are still reeling today over mistakes made years ago.  Stop it!  Remember...failing does NOT make you a failure.  But failing can make you successful.  Again, learn from your mistakes!  Too much time and energy is spent on reeling from our mistakes.  With this in mind I hope you can see how we can actually celebrate our failures.  I mean truly, we can lay down, mope, and drop out of the race when we fail.  But the God-thing to do is to examine the failure, learn from it, apply what you learn, and go forward.  Watch yourself be successful!  Celebrate your failures...because of what can come out of them.