Wednesday; May 6

We were some of the newcomers to the “livestreaming” crowd.  Due to some limitations we had on our internet, our church hadn’t invested in broadcasting our worship service.  However, right before COVID-19 changed the way we were forced to worship, we were blessed with the chance to have a state of the art internet installed.  Armed with this infrastructure we began to piece together a way to take parts of our worship outside the building and into people’s homes.  For the first few weeks, things were going well – in fact, we were doing things more quickly than I expected and were making great strides.  Then came last Sunday.  Honestly, last Sunday seemed to be ruled by Mr. Murphy, “If anything could go wrong, it did.”.  Technical difficulties prevented us going live when it was time to go live and when we did start steaming, the sound wasn’t good.  We had some new things we were hoping to do that never got done because we couldn’t get the basics accomplished.  As I walked away from the pulpit and into my office, I was pretty discouraged – then something hit me.  Had things come so easy to us that we had forgotten about the realities of failure?  We had been blessed with a lot of success (even unexpected success), had we taken that for granted and overlooked the very real possibility of growing pains?
As I contemplated this in our livestreaming, I also thought about its application to our lives.  Are we so blessed and so successful that when we encounter challenges, struggles and failures they hit us harder than they should?  Are we so used to being effective that we become overly discouraged at failure?  The most important thing in life may not be what we do to be successful, but how we handle failure when it happens. 
         Think About It!

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