Words to Treasure
All of us get tripped up in many ways.
James 3:2
The crowd was silent as the chess pieces moved across the boards. Fran looked at her chess pieces and frowned. She was in big trouble. So soon? The Chess Master returned to her board and smiled kindly. He was actually playing ten players at once. He moved in for the kill. “Checkmate!” He reached over, shook her hand, and gave her a warm smile, “Very good game, young lady.” She nodded, still studying the board and searching for the exact move where she had gone wrong. She found it and made a mental note not to ever do that again. Fran had a dream that one day she would be awarded the title of Chess Life Master. But that was a long way off.
There were still lots of games to win and plenty more to lose. But each game, whether she won or lost, was building her knowledge and moving her toward her goal.
Funny thing, sometimes we have to fail to win in the end. Being afraid of failing is a sure way of stopping you from succeeding. Nobody wins all the time, and sometimes what you learn when you don’t win is the most important lesson of all.
Did You Know?
A reporter once asked the inventor Thomas Edison how it felt to fail seven hundred times on his experiments with inventing electric light. Edison replied, “I have not failed seven hundred times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those seven hundred ways will not work.”