Dear Friends,

Last Wednesday, we had the first meeting of the Lenten book group that is discussing Bishop Emma Ineson’s Failure: What Jesus said about Sin, Mistakes, and Messing Stuff Up. When I started out in parish ministry, there was no internet or email, Google or Facebook. Bp Ineson reminds her readers that, “God may take your sins and misdemeanours and put them in the deepest sea, but anyone with a search engine can fish them out again and serve them to you for breakfast.”

She quotes Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking: “You’re not born with fear of failure, it’s not an instinct, it’s something that grows and develops in you as you get older.” Being good at failure, for Syed, means “taking the risk and then learning from it if it doesn’t work.”

Whenever you hear someone say, “We tried that, and it didn’t work,” think of Thomas Edison, whose response (legend has it) to questions about the failures he experienced inventing the light bulb, was, “I have not failed 10,000 times; I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

In the eyes of the world, Jesus was a flop at 33, but things are not always as they appear, and the Crucifixion was NOT the end of the story.

May your Lenten journey feed your soul and nourish your hopes.

Leslie Sackett came up with a great idea for introducing our community to our new rector. Check your eblast for the details. What a fun idea, and what a gift.

Fr. Sherman