Being Your Best
A Woman's Guide to Personal Excellence
By Dorothy Eaton Watts
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Chapter IV
A VICTORIOUS WOMAN
Coles Road in Bangalore, India, is a busy street in a residential area. The spreading branches of flowering trees make it a pleasant place to walk despite the heavy traffic.
Auto rickshaws, buses, horse-drawn carts, motor scooters, cars, and cycles crowd the road. Cows, dogs, and people wander on the dusty paths between the street and compound walls. Street vendors carrying baskets of flowers, eggs, and vegetables on their heads shout their wares at each gate.
In spite of the congestion, the street is remarkably clean, swept each morning by hand, the piles of rubbish gathered in baskets and dumped into concrete dust bins placed in every block.
Walking down this street one October afternoon, I heard a weak meow above the noise of the traffic. I stopped a moment, trying to locate the owner of that pathetic voice.
“Meow!” There it was just a few feet ahead of me. Beside an overflowing dust bin I saw a tiny kitten’s matted fur. Her eyes were sealed shut with pus, but at my touch I could feel her begin to purr. I picked her up. She weighed almost nothing and was so small she fit comfortably into the cup of one hand.
“Oh, you poor, poor thing!” I said. “Did someone throw you out here to die? I’ll take you home with me.”
For several days I fussed over that stray kitten, trying to get her to eat, cleaning her, dressing her wounds. I made her a bed in a basket beside my bed and cared for her day and night. I cried all afternoon the day she died. I had tried so hard, but I had failed. That evening I wrote a poem I entitled “Failure.” The last verse says:
The cry is gone. Pussy is dead.
All my care has been in vain
Oh, God, why? I have done my best.
Nothing is left—but the pain.My reaction to my failure to save a stray cat may seem overdone unless you know the struggles I was going through at that time. It seemed to me in those moments that I was not only a failure as a rescuer of kittens but a failure as a mother, a failure as a wife, a failure as a missionary, and a failure as a Christian.
From the perspective of 17 years later, things look quite different. I can see how God has brought good out of each trial, success out of each failure, and victory from each defeat.
It is easy now to see the good that came out of that difficult period of my life; the incentive to write my first book, the beginning of Sunshine Children’s Home for abandoned children, lessons of dependence upon God, the power of prayer, and the strength of love. It was not so easy to see then.
“Success is the flip side of failure,” one of my bosses used to say when I was a student door-to-door salesperson. He kept insisting that “success is failure turned inside out, the silver tint to the clouds of doubt.”
When I had a bad day, I could hear him saying enthusiastically, “Don’t give up! Learn from each failure, and you will have success. God has not called you to failure, but to success. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
My mother had another way of saying the same thing. “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. ‘Tis a lesson all should heed, try, try again.” I remember her reciting that proverb as she handed me back a skirt I was trying to make. The seem was crooked, the hen uneven, and the waistband wasn’t put on correctly. “Rip it out,” she said. “It’s all wrong.”
“I don’t want to do it over,” I pouted. “Do it anyway,” Mother insisted. “Anything worth doing is worth doing well. If at first you don’t succeed. Try, try again.” I started to cry. The task seemed enormous. “There’s no shame in failing,” Mother said quietly. “The shame is in not learning from your failures.” I did it over, and with Mother’s expert help turned that failure into a success, a skirt that I was proud to wear!
WHAT TO DO WITH FAILURE
There are six things we can do with failure: acknowledge it; thank God for it; learn from it; use it as a stepping-stone to success; overcome it; or transform it into an opportunity.
1. Acknowledge it. Stop trying to excuse it. Because of sin all human beings experience failure. We fool no one when we pretend to be perfect. Confession of our failures allows for the grace of forgiveness and the opportunity for change.
2. Thank God for it. No so long ago I learned this lesson when faced with a particularly difficult teaching situation. I used every trick I had up my sleeve after 15 years in the classroom. Nothing worked. I felt like an utter failure as a teacher. It was then that I laid the problem before the Lord and said, “I have no more ideas. I feel like giving up. All my plans have failed.”Looking back to the night of my despair, I can thank God for allowing me to reach that point, for it was only then that He was able to take control. When the successful year was finished I could say only, Thank You, Lord, for the miracle you wrought!”