Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted
As I mentioned in a previous post, Tollie and I have agreed on a sale price for our home with a potential buyer. Now we’re going through all the necessary steps to finalize the sale – home inspection, appraisal, paperwork, etc. If everything goes smoothly, we are scheduled to close the sale on Monday, June 1 – nearly six years from the day we moved to Macomb.
It’s a bittersweet period for Tollie and me, to say the least. We certainly did not accomplish everything we set out to do in this city. There is still no established United Pentecostal Church in Macomb, which was our ultimate objective when we moved here in June 2003. That bothers me more than I ever thought it would.
On the other hand, we were able to meet and minister to a lot of people during the past six years. We’ve touched a few lives and helped some people through what were or could have been tough times. Tollie and I learned a lot of lessons, made a lot of memories, and even a few close friends. We’ll certainly miss Macomb when we’re gone.
Earlier this year Tollie and I read The Last Lecture, the story of the late Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch. In the book, Pausch, a computer scientist, shares a lesson he learned while working with video-game maker Electronic Arts: “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
Pausch then made this observation about leadership in the world of technology:
“Start-up companies often prefer to hire a chief executive with a failed start-up in his or her background. The person who has failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls.”
That resonated with me when I read it, and helped me better understand the purpose of our time here in Macomb. While we certainly didn’t get what we wanted, we did gain a lot of invaluable experience that has already assisted us in ministering to others. We’re a little wiser because of what we’ve gone through here, and I certainly think we’re more prepared to walk the road ahead.
So what is ahead? After finalizing the sale of our home, we plan to move to Quincy to work in our home church, Calvary Tabernacle, under the leadership of Pastor Randy Pate. We’re going to be involved with evangelism and discipleship, two areas in which Tollie and I definitely want and need to grow stronger. After all, these are the two primary purposes of the church. Everything else is extraneous.