Second Chances

Once Winston Churchill was asked what experience had best equipped him to deal with Hitler leading up to and during the Second World War. To the interviewer’s amazement Churchill recalled the time he’d been forced to repeat a year at school:

“You mean you failed a year at school?”
“I never failed anything. I was given a second opportunity to get it right.”

As John Ortberg writes, “Failure is not an event, but rather a judgement about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.”

Was Winston Churchill a failure? Or Sir Edmund Hillary? Ortberg continues:

Sir Edmund Hillary made several unsuccessful attempts at scaling Mount Everest before finally succeeding … Every time Hillary climbed, he failed. And every time he failed, he learned. And every time he learned, he grew and tried again. And one day he didn’t fail.

God is the God of second chances. Instead of seeing apparent failures as stumbling blocks perhaps we should see them as stepping stones.

Peter Morphew
Chaplain