Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy

Welcome to Day 26 of our Wisdom-Trek and thank you for joining me.  

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom.

Today we look at 25 Ways to Turn Failure into Success (Steps 21-25).

We are recording our podcast from our studio at Home2 in Charlotte, North Carolina. Life is certainly interesting and each day brings its ebbs and flows.  At the end of June, we will be finishing up a contract with a client which we have worked with closely for the past two years.  While we will miss working with this client, we also just found out that a large project with another client, which we have been waiting to start for about five years, will begin next week.

While we try to plan and set the course of our lives, we have to realize that our trek of life will have its twists and turns that we cannot plan for.  This is one reason we need to embrace each new day fully and live abundantly in all that we do.

We can and should plant and water the seeds, but ultimately, it is God who determines when that seed will sprout and how bountiful the harvest will be. This is such a difficult lesson to learn for most of us but one that is so valuable.  With these lessons, we will inevitably run into failures along the path of life, whether those are caused by us or someone/something else.  For this reason, we have spent this week looking at how we can bring beauty from ashes and success through failure.  So let’s examine the final five failure scenarios 21-25.

Failures teach us to let go of the past. We must accept that there’s nothing we can do to change the past. You did the best you could. When you’re facing your failures, know that you were as good, loving, and effective as you could have been. That you did the best that you could based on the information you had at that time.  If you were to go back, you couldn’t do anything differently because that’s who you were and that’s what you knew then. It’s done. Let go of your past. Forgive yourself for your mistakes. That brings to my mind a paragraph from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi. In chapter 3:12-14, "I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us."  "We run from failure...we run to success...but what really matters is not what we’re running from but where we are running to!"   

Stepping stone #21 – Let go of the past.

Don’t feed the fire that burns you.  We need to be very careful what we allow to roam within our minds.  Most of our thoughts of failure only exist in our head and are merely ideas. It may not seem like that, but that is how it is. If you believe that you can’t or shouldn’t do something because it may lead to failure, then that’s a thought in your mind.  If you believe you are better than others, that’s a thought. If you believe you are no good, that’s a thought. Our thoughts are linked together and constructed from other thoughts that we’ve learned and allowed to grow in our minds. These thoughts can be good or bad, but if you are feeding the thoughts of failure in your mind, then that fire that rages within you will consume you.  We need to analyze our thoughts, choose the ones that are good and helpful, and discard the rest. As we looked on a previous day's Trek in Scripture the word "heart" and "mind" can be used interchangeably. Think of that as we read Luke 6:45, "A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good mind,