[ampaterry]

‘Eagles may soar – but Weasels don’t get sucked into Jet Engines!’
That was a poster that someone put up in my old Engineering department. It is funny, but it is also terrible because in so many cases, it is believed! Such belief holds people back from what they might become.

The person who succeeds is not the one who holds back, fearing failure, nor the one who never fails... but rather the one who moves on in spite of failure. If you fear failure, why do you not also fear lack of success? They are the same thing, you know, in that neither attains the prize! And fearing failure so much that you take no chance guarantees that you will have a lack of success!

As Lowell wrote:
It's Not failure, but low aim that's a crime.

As Teddy Roosevelt believed:
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

2 Corinthians 2:14-16 (NLT);
“But thanks be to God, who made us his captives and leads us along in Christ’s triumphal procession. Now wherever we go he uses us to tell others about the Lord and to spread the Good News like a sweet perfume. Our lives are a fragrance presented by Christ to God. But this fragrance is perceived differently by those being saved and by those perishing. To those who are perishing we are a fearful smell of death and doom. But to those who are being saved we are a life-giving perfume. And who is adequate for such a task as this?”

We are ALL adequate for this task; all it requires is that we step forth from that gray twilight that hides us in a fog of not winning/not loosing, and come into the light of the Son – S-O-N, that is!

May God bless us all with the joy of soaring as an Eagle, even though we risk getting sucked into a jet engine, rather than spend our lives slinking around in seeming safety, hidden in the underbrush.