Being Your Best
A Woman's Guide to Personal Excellence
CHAPTER IV - A VICTORIOUS WOMAN (Continued)
3. Learn from it. Often when I do something realy dumb, my husband says to me: Charge it to tuition. His acceptance and forgiveness of my failure have had a lot to do with any successes I have had.
The rejection of a manuscript is difficult for me to handle. The first time I had a book manuscript returned I hid it in the back of a file drawer and didn’t look at it for a year. Then I got it out, tried to learn how I could improve it, redid the manuscript, and sent it back. Again it was rejected!
I was devastated. I felt a failure as an author. Again I hid it for a year but eventually got it out and tried to learn where I’d gone wrong. I corrected those mistakes and sent it off again. This time it was accepted for publication. I learned much from those rejections.
4. Use it as a stepping-stone to success. When we were asked to go to India as missionaries, I wrote to the church leaders, informing them that I was a teacher and asking them what they planned for me to do. A letter came back. “We expect nothing of you but to make your husband happy.”
That sounded easy enough to do. No need, then, to take my teaching materials. It would only mean extra baggage. I threw away or gave away all my teaching materials. I was not yet off the boat in Madras harbor when I was informed, “We have a job for you, Dorothy. We’d like you to teach the dozen or so expatriate children.”
We had almost no textbooks, and it took more than six months for them to arrive by surface mail. Meanwhile that apparent perplexity turned into a real blessing, for it caused me to do some of the most creative teaching of my career. That experience literally transformed the way I teach. We took field trips into the community, learned to do search in World Book Encyclopedia, and wrote our own reading materials for first grade. The children did much more writing and exploring than they would have done with textbooks. We had a wonderful time!
Having once escaped from the Tyranny of the textbook, I have never been so tied to it since. Because of a situation that seemed to promise failure, I became a better teacher than I would have been otherwise. While struggling against failure, it became a stepping-stone to success.
5. Overcome it. All failure is not sin, but all sin is failure. If sin is our problem, then we can by the grace of God overcome that failure. Jesus came to earth not only to die for our moral failures but to show us how to overcome them. The methods He has given us are Scripture, the Holy Spirit, Prayer, song, and misnistry of angels.
When tempted by the devil in the wilderness, Jesus fought failure with Scripture. “It is written,” He said, quoting verses He had learned at His mother’s knee. “Thy word have I hid in my heart,” said David, “that I might not sin against thee.”
Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit to help us battle sin. Angels are another source of help. Prayer is indispensable in obtaining victory over sin. Have you ever thought of singing as a means of overcoming sin? It is a powerful tool to help us gain victory.
6. Transform it. It is possible to turn a defeat into victory. Sometimes all that is necessary is just a change of the way we look at things. The successful Adventist woman will see a possibility in every failure. She will seek, by God’s power, to transform that failure into success.
The story of Brett Livingstone Strong and the Malibu Rock is an excellent illustration of seeing the possibility in failure and transforming it into success.
A 115-ton rock perched above the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California, and threatened those who lived below. Removal of the rock took four days and cost the government close to $1 million.
Brett Strong looked at that worthless failure of a rock and saw in it something of great value. He purchased it for $100.00, and then paid $25,000 to move it to a grassy knoll near a shopping center 20 miles away. For the next 70 days he worked to transform that rock.
When he was finished he had created a remarkable likeness of John Wayne, which was purchased by a man in Scottsdale, Arizona, for $1 million. Brett Strong took a million-dollar failure and transformed it into a million-dollar success.
By God’s grace and power that’s what I want to do with the failure of my life.