Pastor's Pen
From The Desk of.... Dr. Raymond Jones, Pastor
Change Your Vision!
We have celebrated and praised God for blessing us to exit the Year 2021 and enter the Year 2022. We are so grateful to have made it. For there were millions who did not make it. For Death captured many on the final day of the year. Now ask yourself, how many challenges did you face last year? Then ask yourself, “How many challenges were you victorious over? Then ask yourself, if you had to grade yourself on a scale of zero to ten, with ten being excellent and zero being poor. What would your 2021 grade be? Selah!
We often view our failures as defeats and our zeros as terrible but is that really the case? I would have to respond a definitely No! Why? Because if you succeed and do not understand what caused you to succeed, you have actually failed! Yet, if you failed but you learned many valuable lessons from the failure, you have actually succeeded! That sounds contradictory butmany of the greatest inventions were discovered through multiple failures.
➢ Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times before perfecting the incandescent electric light bulb.
➢ Sir James Dyson failed 5,126 times over the course of 15 years before creating the eponymous best-selling bagless vacuum cleaner.
➢ What about Albert Einstein? As a child he did not start speaking until he was four, reading until he was seven, and was thought to be mentally handicapped. He went on to win a Nobel Prize and altered the world’s approach to physics.
➢ Would you believe that the great Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team? Yet he went on to lead his NBA Team to Six Championships, five Most Valuable Player Awards and later Michael Jordan became unarguably the greatest basketball player of all time.
Michael Jordan made this statement which I feel should keep you striving for Victory and Succeed in the Year 2022. And I quote, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost three hundred games. On twenty-six occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
➢ Babe Ruth had a total of 1330 strikeouts in his career. Ruth actually held a record for the number of times he had struck out, a record that would remain unbroken for 30 years. yet, few people remember Babe for his strikeouts! Babe Ruth's 714 home runs are one of those baseball numbers that become ingrained in the minds of so many who follow the game of baseball. Each time Babe Ruth struck out, he toad himself these words, “I’m going to hit the next one right over the flagpole.” And when it happened, he would say “God must have been with me!”
What am I saying to each of you? I am saying failure is only a failure when you allow it to cause you to Stop! All the challenges and failures of 2022 have done one thing. They have positioned you to Succeed on ever hand! Now we do what the Apostle Paul states that he did in Philippians 3:13-14 “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before. I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
We interrogate every Success; we interrogate every Failure, and we grasp the reason for both. We harvest what we have learned from both, and we sow the results into every opportunity which arrives in the Year 2022. Then we watch God cause Manifestation. For we no longer see the darkness, we see the Light inside of the darkness!
Always remembering that Failure only failure when we don’t discover the Success that is buried inside of failure!
Blessing,
Dr. Raymond Jones
