“Our failed tests teach us invaluable lessons we couldn’t learn any other way.”

A thought by Mark Batterson (2011-01-18) from his book, Soulprint: Discovering Your Divine Destiny (p. 84). Multnomah Books. Kindle Edition.

I don’t know how you handled wrong and right answers on a test when you were young or even if they mattered to you. Maybe all that mattered to you was the grade. But for me it was those questions that I got wrong. I would find out which ones they were and then I would search the book or my notes and find out what the right answer was. The right answers I had gotten right so I didn’t worry about them anymore but those I had gotten wrong I searched to find what was right.

Our failures in life can be like that too. There is always a invaluable lesson to be learned in life no matter what it is. Now I chose a long time ago to not be controlled by the negatives of life but to change them into a positive. Somehow in every negative in my life, God has helped me to see it from a positive standpoint. It has taken a lot of years of everyday reading a Psalm in the Old Testament of the Bible. The psalmist writers seem to take a negative and turn it into a positive by getting their eyes off the circumstances and onto God. I love the Psalms.

There is a discipline in taking the negatives, the failures in your life and seeing the lessons to be learned and seeing how God can bring good out of them. It is all a matter to trusting in the sovereignty and the grace of God. Of course you must have a relationship with Him for Him to work in and through your life. That is one of the great benefits of knowing Him in a personal way.

Now in these failures my humanness would drag me to a kind of despair but I wouldn’t let myself stay there long. God has shown me that the despair has a way of taking me away from the good in the bad, the lesson to be learned and the positive character quality to be strengthened, to be cultivated.

Yes life is tough but all things work together for our good if we have a relationship with Christ. The Apostle Paul was in prison when he put that thought down in his letter to the Philippians in the New Testament of the Bible.

Yes failure can be tough to go through but it is very important to not waist it and to learn the invaluable lesson in it. Just ask God for wisdom. He said He wants to give it to you.

So what invaluable lesson have you learned lately?

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