Leadership Thought: Failure, Why Chippie Doesn’t Sing Much Anymore 

Dear Friends,

It has been said that the victorious Christian life is a series of new beginnings.

The Psalmist writes “If the Lord delights in a man’s way he makes his steps firm, though he stumble he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with His hand (Psalm 37:23-24). We all will stumble or worse yet, step into sin, but those who are sincere and repentant will find the hand of the Lord ready to lift them up and help lead them to a new beginning. They don’t have to live in the muck and mire of their past failures.

Chuck Swindoll tells the story of Chippie the parakeet. He said the bird’s problems began when the woman who owned him decided to clean up the seeds and loose feathers from the bottom of his cage using a vacuum. When the phone rang, the owner turned to pick it you and you guessed it-with a thud and a whoosh Chippie was gone. The owner quickly tuned off the vacuum and unzipped the bag. There was Chippie. He was stunned but breathing. Seeing that he was covered with black dust, his owner rushed Chippie to the bathtub where she turned on the faucet full blast and held the bird under the icy water. At that point she realized that she’d done even more damage, and she quickly cranked up her blow dryer and gave the wet shivering little parakeet a blast. Swindoll finished the story by saying, Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore (Quoted from Failing Forward John Maxwell, p 77).

Maxwell writes that “There are people like Chippie, who have had some bad experience in life, and who don’t sing much anymore.” They have lost their song, their joy, their enthusiasm, and their zest or living. They no longer will take risks for fear of failing again so they live as prisoners of their past held up in their little cocoon of self-pity simply having checked out of life. Rather than learning from the past and not making the same mistake again, they live in the past as its prisoner. Learning from the past is healthy. It leads to change, but living in the past is unhealthy, even deadly.

May God help us to realize that His hand is upon us when we fail, and He is ever ready to lift us, and steady us, and start us on the road of new beginnings.

The Apostle Paul said it this way: “But one thing I do forgetting what is behind

and straining toward to what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:13-14

That is great advice and each one of us who has ever failed in life needs to heed and hang on to it.

Yours in faith and friendship,
Tom

P.S.  “Often the doorway to success is entered through the hallway of failure.” Erwin Lutzer (Taken from Quotations  for the Christian World, Edythe Draper, p197