Ms. Prewitt told me that you all enjoy participating in chapel and challenged me to find a way to get you all involved. So we are going to play a little game. I would like you to raise your hand if you have ever played a sport: basketball, baseball, tennis, or even ballet. Now keep your hand up if you have ever made a mistake in that game. Keep your hand up if you have ever turned the ball over, hit the ball out of bounds, fumbled the football. Now look around.
Raise your hand if you have ever played a musical instrument. Now keep your hand raised if you have ever missed a note or made a mistake when playing in front of people.
Raise your hand if you have ever received a bad grade on a project or a test, or even a paper. (Teachers, that includes you).
Now raise your exam if you have ever failed at anything that you can think of that you have tried in life.
Now I want to share with you a little about my life after I left Grace St. Luke’s as a rising High School student, the change many of you will make in just a few months, and some of the failures that I have struggled with in my life.
The first failure took place when I was in the eighth Grade and a student in Mr. Philip’s Algebra I class. Mr. Phil believed that I was a gifted Algebra student and one day he asked me to represent GSL at a state wide competition at Rhodes College. Three of us were asked to compete, all of us believing we were gifted math students. I failed horribly. I felt I didn’t even get a third of the questions right. And after passing his class and getting an A for the year, I took the placement exam at CBHS and was forced to take Algebra I in the summer. I failed and was asked to take Algebra I again as a freshman. I felt like I had wasted an entire year, and this was a horrible crush to my ego when all of my other friends at other schools were taking Geometry.
The second failure took place about five years later. As you will soon find out, I ended up being a pretty good math and science student so I went to Purdue University, a great school for engineering and the sciences and begin studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. No raise your hand if you know what Linear Circuit Analysis is? After a semester taking that class I am not sure I could answer that question. I failed and also dropped my advance C programming class. For the first time in my life I got a big fat F on my report card. My parents were horrified, upset, and very frustrated. I was no longer an Engineer. I had failed.
Today is the first chapel of the New Year! Now raise your hand if you made a New Year’s resolution. Don’t worry, it is not too late in my book if you leave today and make one. A New Year brings new life and new opportunity. In my opinion the most famous Prime Minster in England’s History is Sir Winston Churchill. He ruled England during World War II and afterwards in the 50’s. Prime Minister Churchill once failed a grade in school. Or he failed as we would see it. But he believed he was given a second opportunity to do an even better job and that he had an advantage over everyone else. He was a little bit above the game. Churchill said several great things about failure. First: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” And “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill had the right idea.
I took Algebra I again as a CBHS freshman and my teacher signed me up for that same statewide Algebra I test that I failed before. After three hours of problem solving at Rhodes College, I turned in the highest score in West Tennessee, and the third highest in the whole state. And I was still able to take AP Calculus my senior year.
In college, I found a subject, International Relations and Political Science that I was passionate about, began to work much harder, brought my grades up and even managed to finish school in four and a half years. I even managed to finish with a moderately respectable grade point average.
I am excited to be here with you to bring in the New Year. This is the 2009th year of our Lord, a gift from God. And as I am sure you have heard Father Ron say many times, “And Now my friends, I invite you to,” I invite you to think about all last year and all the missed musical notes and layups, the slip ups on the tests, or the times you were mean to your sisters and brothers, and know that we are always given a second, third, and sometimes even seventy seventh chance and to have what Churchill calls, courage. This year is a gift from God to have courage. Welcome in the New Year and remember, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”
