Trust God, rise from failure

There is a story told of a man who was passing by a herd of elephants. He suddenly stopped and observed something strange. He found each elephant tied only by a single rope.

He said to himself “These gigantic creatures can easily breakaway from the ropes and escape”.  Seeing the trainer standing close-by, he asked “why don’t the elephants escape”. The trainer replied “You see, when the elephants are newly born itself we tie the same rope to its feet regularly.  As the years go by and they grow-up they get fixed with the thought that they can never break away from the rope and so never make an attempt to escape”.

In our lives too, we never break new ground just because we had experienced failure or fallen in the past.  We get fixed with the thought that we can never take the next step or breakaway from discouragement. But God invites us to draw strength from Him. 

The Psalmist sings of the power of God in lifting up those who put their trust in Him “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God” (Psalm 40:2-3)

Saint Paul who went through all kinds of suffering and disappointments wrote to the Phillippians about his firm trust in God “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).  The great inventor Thomas Alva Edison credited with the invention of the microphone, the phonograph, the incandescent light, the storage battery, talking movies, and more than 1000 other things saw a disaster in his life in December 1914.

He had worked for ten long years on a storage battery. But suddenly a massive fire broke out destroying all the goods and materials for experiments.  Eight fire tenders could not douse the flames. Sixty seven year old Edison watched the flames calmly.

The next morning looking at the ruins together with his wife and son said “There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.” Three weeks after the fire, Edison succeeded in inventing the first phonograph.

Prophet Jeremiah pronounces the word of God “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for Me?”(Jeremiah 32:27).

Think also of the words of Prophet Isaiah about the power of God “He gives power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increases their strength” (Isaiah 40:29)