Dear Parish Family,
 
The word failure can mean many things.  Failure to accomplish several things which were on our “to do” list today.  The failure to give a warm smile or encouragement to someone. The failure to be as successful as we had hoped. Having a certain brokenness. Failure to arrest addiction. The failure to change the course of our lives, and on and on.
 
In order to grow we need to learn from our failures!  The old adage of “we learn from our mistakes and not from our successes” is so very true. We need to reevaluate and create opportunities rather than letting failure consume us.  Does God want us to fail?  I am sure many of us have asked ourselves this. Jeremiah 29:11 reminds us “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, and not harm you, to give you hope and a future.”
 
What excellent examples of failure and ultimate success from this article by Mathew Kelly.
 
 
None of us is perfect. This is a truth that most of us learn early in life. Yet though we are not perfect, we areperfectible.

We have all witnessed ourselves and others failing in different areas of our lives. Some allow their failure to be transformed into despair and defeat. Others are able to get up, move on, and struggle again.

Some failures just look like failures. Other failures really are failures and need to be recognized as such.
Vincent van Gogh, the Dutch painter, is now hailed as one of the greatest artists of all time. But he did notenjoy the same acclaim and success during his lifetime. He painted 1,700 paintings; during his lifetime he soldonly one of them, for a mere eighty-five dollars. Almost one hundred years to the day after his death, one of hispaintings was sold at action for forty million dollars.
Some failures just look like failures.

Imagine if after painting five pictures and not being able to sell them, van Gogh had quit. Today we would not have Sunflowers and so many of his other works to enjoy. There are hundreds of examples of men and womenwho have persisted despite failure or apparent failure. Another of these is Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Babe Ruth knew one thing: he could hit a baseball out of the park. He did what heknew, and he did it often—a total of 714 times. But Babe Ruth had his share of failures too. He had to walkback to the dugout 1,330 times after striking out in front of thousands of people. Imagine if after Babe Ruth hadstruck out one hundred times, he had said to himself, “Well, one hundred times is enough times to make anymistake. I quit.” And yet so often we quit long before we have even reached one hundred.

How do you respond to failure? When you fail, particularly in your struggle to become a better person, how doyou respond?

Matthew Kelly
From A Call to Joy
 
May our loving God bless you!
 
Mary Jo