The cornerstone

I sat in church this morning and heard a statement. The stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone. It was used as my words of advice today and I don't think many people understood why. You see, I couldn't help think about how many times people have been rejected in their lives. I'm not talking about being rejected from a date or a job (although that could work I guess). I'm talking about the number of times people have failed, have been told they don't belong, or have been told they couldn't do something. We are the stone that can sometimes be rejected, but we are also the cornerstone in so many ways.

I began thinking on my run today about learning to ride my bike. I saw a father pushing his daughter and it made me think about this statement as well. How many times did I fall off the bike before I actually learned to ride? I'm willing to guess a lot. Then I began to think about learning how to walk. How many times did I fall? Plenty of times. Yet you see, I never gave up. If I had given up I wouldn't know how to ride a bike, or even how to walk. Suddenly failing seemed so simple. Suddenly I realized how many times we've all gotten back up after falling.

I think in the end I learned that we are stronger then we give ourselves credit for. I failed this weekend. Flat out failed. I also let that failure eat away at me for the past two days. It took some enlightenment today to finally realize that I've failed many times before in my life and I will fail many more times. In truth, we all will. Yet I've also overcome those failures many many times. I've overcome them so much that to this day I cannot remember how long it took me to overcome then. I just have the evidence that I did. We all have the evidence that we did.

Just because we are rejected doesn't mean we can't become the cornerstone. Our failures do not and should not define us. We have evidence of our successes all around us. If we overcame failure then, we can overcome it again.

We are stronger then we think.