Insight for Living

Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:8–10)

It happens to every one of us. Teachers as well as students. Cops as well as criminals. Bosses as well as secretaries. Parents as well as kids. The diligent as well as the lazy. Not even presidents are immune. Or corporation heads who earn six-figure salaries. The same is true of well-meaning architects and hard-working builders and clear-thinking engineers . . . not to mention pro ball players, politicians, and preachers.

What? Making mistakes, that’s what. Doing the wrong thing, usually with the best of motives. And it happens with remarkable regularity.

Let’s face it, success is overrated. All of us crave it despite daily proof that man’s real genius lies in quite the opposite direction. It’s really incompetence that we’re all pros at. Which brings me to a basic question that has been burning inside me for months: How come we’re so surprised when we see it in others and so devastated when it has occurred in ourselves?

Show me the guy who wrote the rules for perfectionism and I’ll guarantee he’s a nailbiter with a face full of tics . . . whose wife dreads to see him come home. Furthermore, he forfeits the right to be respected because he’s either guilty of not admitting he blew it or he has become an expert at cover-up.

You can do that, you know. Stop and think of ways certain people can keep from coming out and confessing they blew it. Doctors can bury their mistakes. Lawyers’ mistakes get shut up in prison—literally. Dentists’ mistakes are pulled. Plumbers’ mistakes are stopped. Carpenters turn theirs into sawdust. I like what I read in a magazine recently.

Just in case you find any mistakes in this magazine, please remember they were put there for a purpose. We try to offer something for everyone. Some people are always looking for mistakes and we didn’t want to disappoint you!

Hey, there have been some real winners! Back in 1957, Ford bragged about “the car of the decade.” The Edsel. Unless you lucked out, the Edsel you bought had a door that wouldn’t close, a hood that wouldn’t open, a horn that kept getting stuck, paint that peeled, and a transmission that wouldn’t fulfill its mission. One business writer likened the Edsel’s sales graph to an extremely dangerous ski slope. He added that so far as he knew, there was only one case on record of an Edsel ever being stolen.

And how about that famous tower in Italy? The “leaning tower,” almost twenty feet out of perpendicular. The guy that planned that foundation to be only ten feet deep (for a building 179 feet tall) didn’t possess the world’s largest brain. How would you like to have listed in your resumé, “Designed the Leaning Tower of Pisa”?

A friend of mine, realizing how adept I am in this business of blowing it, passed on to me an amazing book (accurate, but funny) entitled The Incomplete Book of Failures, by Stephen Pile. Appropriately, the book itself had two missing pages when it was printed, so the first thing you read is an apology for the omission—and an erratum slip that provides the two pages.

Among the many wild and crazy reports are such things as the least successful weather report, the worst computer, the most boring lecture, the worst aircraft, the slowest selling book, the smallest ever audience, the ugliest building ever constructed, the most chaotic wedding ceremony, and some of the worst statements . . . proven wrong by posterity. Some of those statements, for example, were:

“Far too noisy, my dear Mozart. Far too many notes.” —The Emperor Ferdinand after the first performance of The Marriage of Figaro

“If Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.” —Philip Hale, Boston music critic, 1837

“Rembrandt is not to be compared in the painting of character with our extraordinarily gifted English artist Mr. Rippingille.” —John Hunt (1775–1848)

“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant . . . utterly impossible.” —Simon Newcomb (1835–1909)

“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out.” —Decca Recording Company when turning down the Beatles in 1962

“You will never amount to very much.” —A Munich schoolmaster to Albert Einstein, aged ten

And on and on it goes. The only thing we can be thankful for when it comes to blowing it is that nobody keeps a record of ours. Or do they? Or do you with others?

Come on, ease off. If our perfect Lord is gracious enough to take our worst, our ugliest, our most boring, our least successful, our leaning-tower failures, our Edsel flops, and forgive them, burying them in the depths of the sea, then it’s high time we give each other a break.

In fact, He promises full acceptance along with full forgiveness in print for all to read . . . without an erratum sheet attached. Isn’t that encouraging? Can’t we be that type of encourager to one another? After all, imperfection is one of the few things we still have in common. It links us close together in the same family!

So then, whenever one of us blows it and we can’t hide it, how about a little support from those who haven’t been caught yet?

Oops, correction. How about a lot of support?

Copyright © 1985, 1988, 1994 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. 

Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Listen to today's broadcast of Insight for Living with Chuck Swindoll at OnePlace.com.
Visit the Bible-teaching ministry of Chuck Swindoll at www.insight.org.