Successful Failures
February 6, 2013 by ddkaarre
Story of the Day for Wednesday February 6, 2013
Successful Failures
And when we heard this, we and all the others begged Paul not to go up to Jerusalem.
Does the Loch Ness Monster really exist? The firefighting crew from the town of Hemel Hempstead, England, decided to find out.
What if you could lure the elusive monster out of hiding by enticing it with a female decoy? In 1975, the firemen lashed together a dozen oil barrels for buoyancy and fashioned, with a half ton of paper mâché, a seductive monstress — complete with long eyelashes. Inside the body, one man operated a canister that blew smoke out her nostrils while another operated the boat motor.
The female monster was painted green and ready for love. They pulled her on the back of a fire truck and slowly drove to northern Scotland.
She coyly slipped into the waters of Loch Ness without incident and, for fifteen miles, cooed out a mating call as she followed the shoreline.
Sadly, the Loch Ness Monster failed to appear. Some claimed the pre-recorded mating call, that of a bull walrus, was not an appropriate invitation to romance. Others pointed to the loss of her tail when she accidentally struck a pier.
Stephen Pile wryly nailed it, “No girl is at her best under these circumstances.”
Paul’s last journey of freedom seemed a preventable tragedy. He sailed from Ephesus to Tyre, where fellow disciples warned him not to continue on to Jerusalem. Paul ignored their warning. When his ship landed at Caesarea, the prophet Agabus warned Paul he would be arrested if he continued on to Jerusalem. Paul ignored this warning as well and continued on to Jerusalem.
Sure enough, the apostle Paul was arrested. He would never see freedom again.
You can imagine the exasperation of his friends. “We repeatedly warned him not to go. What was he thinking!”
What was Paul thinking? Maybe that, when God’s in control, even his arrest isn’t a bad thing. Because of it, Paul’s case was kicked up from one court to another until, eventually, he won an audience in Rome. Those in high authority, whom he couldn’t normally reach, would now hear the wonder of how Jesus transformed him from a murderer into a gentle child of God. What everyone else saw as a tragedy, Paul viewed as a victory. He wanted those in high places to hear the Good News.
Paul’s arrest was a failure only if you weren’t thinking like Paul.
We knew the firemen’s plan to find the Loch Ness Monster was doomed from the start, didn’t we?
Odd thing, though. On their long, slow journey transporting their monster to Loch Ness, sightseers in every town thronged the sidewalks to see their wacky invention. They sold thousands of T-shirts with their female Nessie on it.
Can you believe those loons just happened to raise a ton of money for a worthy cause?
(text copyright by climbinghigher.org and by Marty Kaarre)
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