Pastor Ken
Recently, my wife and I traveled along the Chattahoochee River in Georgia. One morning during our hike near the water’s edge, a spider’s web about two to three feet wide with a big spider on it caught my attention. It reminded me of a story I read when I was a child, but I’d forgotten some details. When I got home and searched on the Internet, I found out that it was about a Scottish king named Robert the Bruce, who lived at the beginning of the 14th century.
At that time, Scotland was at war with England to fight for independence. Robert, who had already lost the last six battles, led the remnants of the Scottish army to retreat to the forest. He himself went into a cave to rest. In the stormy weather, he noticed a spider trying to weave a web near the cave entrance. The spider was very patient and waited for the wind to blow the first thread to the other side. After it stuck, the spider started to spin and weave the web. Unfortunately, when a gust of wind blew, the unfinished web broke, and the process started all over again. Six failures later, Robert felt sorry for it. But on the seventh attempt, the spider succeeded. Robert suddenly realized that was exactly what he’d experienced. Inspired and encouraged, he gathered his soldiers and fought against England again. They won the battle, securing a period of independence for Scotland.
As the saying goes, “Success comes from trying.” Trying may not necessarily lead to success, but if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. We understand this truth. However, we can’t just keep trying over and over again. After each failure, we must review why we failed. What factors could we improve? Relying solely on chance to succeed and blindly repeating the same process would be unwise. Only when we find out the cause of failure, we can solve the problem.
Some parents want their children to reach a certain level in reading, sports, music, or other skills, but they themselves don’t understand the activities in that area. All they know is to urge their children to try again and again. As a result, the children become frustrated, bored with the exercises, and blame themselves for their failures. In fact, what a child needs is assistance or coaching from an “insider” who can show them how to improve and do better after each failure. Only then, it is meaningful to try.
If you don’t have the right coach to help you, the best way is to videotape and conduct a review by yourself. Want to practice public speaking or conducting a meeting? Listening to the recording, we may notice the presence of too many “filler words.” Interesting in singing? When we play back the recording, we can hear where we’re off-key or have trouble pronouncing the words. Successful speakers and performers achieve outstanding performance only after being criticized countless times, plus non-stop self-reflection and evaluation.
Whether it is about a performance or to attain a skill, we can certainly be inspired by a spider’s hard work in weaving a web. However, we also need to use human thinking ability to reflect on our performance in order to improve it. With perseverance plus problem-solving, we will surely succeed one day.
