Forwarded Messages

"Suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not  light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds  it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors  together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin. In  the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the  angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:8-10 NIV).

I admit it. I love the office shredder. It might be because I am  mesmerized by loud machines that destroy things. But I am also  fascinated by the process. After a document is run through, there is no  way to reconstruct it, no way to put it together again, and no way to  know what was originally there. We use it to destroy sensitive  documents, addresses, and any material we do not want seen. I also use it for something else. I use it to destroy my mistakes. If I  print the wrong form, misspell a name, or use the wrong name -- a quick  trip to the shredder and it is as if it never happened. It is gone  forever.

"I speak without exaggeration," Thomas Edison once said, "when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet in two cases only did my experiments prove the truth of my theory." That means Edison developed 2,998 failed theories along with his two successful experiments! The entire story of the light bulb is a long, tedious tale of repeated trial and failure. Yet, through it all, Edison was watching attentively -- and learning.