Failing Forward

Failing Forward

The only thing that Harland had ever succeeded at was failure. He was just five when his daddy died, leaving his family penniless. At age fourteen, he dropped out of school and hit the road. He worked as a farmhand but soon quit. He became a streetcar conductor but was fired. At age sixteen he lied about his age and joined the army. It wasn’t long before he was drummed out of the service. He headed to Alabama, where he tried his hand as a blacksmith. He failed at that, too.

After an unbroken string of failures, Harland found his calling as a locomotive fireman. He figured that he had finally found himself. He was on top of the world when he fell in love and got married. She announced that she was pregnant the day he came home to tell her he had been fired again. A few weeks later, his young wife gave away all their possessions and moved back in with her parents.

Then came the Great Depression. Harland couldn’t win for losing. After studying law by correspondence, he was licensed to practice. But he lost his career when he got in a fistfight with one of his clients in a courtroom. He got a gig as a ferryboat captain but was fired after several accidents. He managed a gas station but lost that job when he shot a competitor in an argument over signs.

Later in life he became the chief cook and bottle washer in a little restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. His establishment became so popular that it put the town on the map, earning him a prestigious award from the governor. Harland was finally a winner. But the new highway bypassed the town, and Harland had to sell his eatery for a fraction of its value. At age sixty-five he was back to square one.

Not long afterward, the mail carrier delivered his first Social Security payment. When he looked at that $105 check, something inside him exploded. He had struggled all his life and had nothing to show for it. So he took that check to the bank and began a fund to start a new venture. That franchise would become one of the most successful in US history.

The man who didn’t succeed until he had logged a lifetime of failures, who didn’t get started until it was time to stop, was Harland Sanders. You remember him by the title the Kentucky governor gave him: colonel—Colonel Harland Sanders. The business he started with a $105 Social Security check and a “finger lickin’ good” recipe was Kentucky Fried Chicken. That little venture that Harland started late in life has become a global empire of 20,000 stores in 125 countries, generating an annual revenue of $23 billion.

Colonel Sanders’s story teaches us that it’s never too late to succeed. On the other hand, it’s always too soon to give up. No situation is beyond hope. No sin is beyond redemption. No failure is final. Maybe you are on the verge of giving in or giving up. If so, look again at seventy-year-old Harland. He would agree with this:

Failure is never final or fatal, as long as you fail forward.

The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again. But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked.

Proverbs 24:16