Hi, and welcome to Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the word, prayers, and our heart.

I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me, which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent.

What comes to your mind when I say this word, failure?

Now what comes to your mind when I say this word, failure? Now what comes to your mind when I say this word, success?

Think about that quickly, and we'll be right back to talk about how the two are much more connected than what you might think.

Ooh. I went to Honduras a few years back and when I did, I came back and wrote a blog post about the idea of failure and success because it was something fresh on my mind and in it I wrote this.

Success and failure are the same. One of them just wears better clothes. Now I know what you're thinking. What in the world are you saying, Lisa? So here's what I mean. Success and failure are both things that can break us, break us down mentally,

cause us to crash in their wake if we don't handle them well, turn us into different people

if we don't turn them over to God. So even though we want success in life and we reject failure,

success can be just as detrimental to us as failure can be,

and in that way, success and failure are the same. Success just dresses better. But I want to

focus on failure today because that's the place I think many of us stay stuck in life, where we

have failed or gone wrong, and we spent

a lot of time counting, keeping track of our failures, I think. We probably don't have a tangible

notebook or something that we write the failures down in. I certainly hope we don't, but we keep

great mental notes on all the ways we've either let someone down, made a bad

decision, done the wrong thing, caused pain, messed up royally, or disappointed ourselves.

And a lot of us are notorious for bringing those things up both to ourselves and sometimes

to others over and over again. I think something powerful we could do

in 2018 is to stop counting our failures. What would happen if on purpose we lost track, right?

Seriously, think about this. What if we willfully chose to make our minds forget the failures?

Now, I know this sounds crazy. You might say, Lisa, I can't forget. You might be surprised how

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