麻豆约拍

From Revered Kate Bottley, Vicar of the churches of Blyth, Scooby and Ranskill:

Over the last few weeks as part of my job as a chaplain at a college I鈥檝e been on invigilation duty. One of part of the team of staff looking after students sitting their exams. It鈥檚 a nervous time for them and enough to bring scary flashbacks to our own school days for most of the teachers too. But now exam season is over and the GCSE鈥檚 and A levels are all done there鈥檚 not much for us to do but sit back and nervously wait for the results to come in. But I鈥檒l confess that I quite enjoyed my own GCSE鈥檚 and I didn鈥檛 mind my A levels but there was one exam in my youth the thought of which is still enough to bring me out in a cold sweat. It was my ballroom dancing bronze medal rhumba.聽

I was lousy, no panache, no flair and all the wrong steps in all the wrong places, from the moment I stepped onto the polished floor I was doomed. While my Pase doble was passable and my waltz respectable, my rhumba was rhythmless. And inevitably come results day I鈥檇 failed miserably, my pride, not to mention my dance partner鈥檚 toes, were crushed. It was time to rethink, either I could give up or I could try and pass the thing. And so I carried on, kept on dancing and a year later resat or rather re-stepped the exam again, I passed, only just, but I passed.

Some of the most successful people have been the most fabulous failures in their time. Walt Disney, sacked from his first job for lacking imagination, the Beatles famously rejected by Decca Records because guitar bands had no future and Fred Astaire who鈥檚 write up from an early screen test said 鈥榗an鈥檛 act, can鈥檛 sing can dance, a little鈥�. The bible has its fair share of failures too. The disciple Peter , who Jesus described as 鈥榯he rock of my church鈥�, failed in his faith by denying he knew Jesus at the very moment he needed him most, this didn鈥檛 stop Peter from going on to become the founder of the first churches.

Messing things up might just be the best thing that could possibly happen to us. It鈥檚 not always our successes that shape us most, sometimes a fabulous failure can forge our future.