I can do all this through him who gives me strength. - Philippians 4:13

You know who Thomas Edison was, right? The guy who invented the light bulb.

Well, one night he was working late in his laboratory. At two o’clock in the morning, an assistant came in and noticed that the inventor was smiling broadly. “Have you solved the problem?” he asked. “No,” replied Edison. “That experiment didn’t work at all. Now I can start over again.” Edison could say that because he realized that each failure brought him a little closer to finding the right answer.

This is not a new idea. In New Testament days Mark had joined Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey to Cyprus (an island in the Mediterranean Sea) and Perga (which is in the country of Turkey), but then he left them. It looked like Mark had failed. But he was willing to try again. So he became an important helper for Barnabas on a later trip to Cyprus. Still later, when Paul was in a Roman dungeon, he asked for Mark, whom he called “helpful” (2 Timothy 4:11), to visit him.

Have you had a major fail? Don’t let it stop you. Learn from it and move ahead. Trust God to give you strength. Use that failure as a step toward success.