When a flop is not

If you watch the Olympic high jump event, you will see people clearing the bar with their back to the bar, in a kind of inverted J form that is known as the Fosbury Flop! It is so named for Dick Fosbury who won the 1968 high jump gold medal using the then unorthodox style. Prior to that time most jumpers used the standard Straddle form going over the upright and landing on their feet. Fosbury could not master that technique and learned to hurl himself over the bar, landing on his shoulders - unceremoniously. He flopped over the bar. His technique was actually a better use of the physical law of inertia and allowed for a higher jump because of the shift in the center of gravity.

Sometimes you and I just can't do what others do. We work to learn the style, try hard, and end up a flop... or so we think. In may just be that in the moment we feel most like a failure, God is accomplishing amazing things in us and through us. We all love to stride through life, on our feet, dignity intact. It is wonderful when all things work well, our prayers find instant answers, and everybody loves us. Tragically, when that happens the human tendency is to take the credit and puff up with pride! Like Nebuchadnezzar, a king of a great ancient empire, we begin to believe we did all by ourselves. He boasted, "Look at this, Babylon the great! And I built it all by myself, a royal palace adequate to display my honor and glory!" Daniel 4:30 That night, his mind broke and for the next seven years he lived as a public failure, like a wild animal. When sanity returned, he praised God!

Paul, the apostle with the great mind, started life as a success! He studied with leading scholars, gained a seat on the governing council, and was on his way to prominence. Then he met the Lord who knocked him down and while he was on his back revealed Himself to Paul. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Paul was a flop, a man too prone to getting in trouble, who got arrested and thrown out of one town after another. But, he came to understand a principle that while true is not all that pleasant in practicality- flops learn to depend on Someone greater than themselves. Paul said that the Lord told him,
"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties.
For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10. NLT

Fosbury's famed flop became a means of reaching a gold medal, but not without some ridicule in the process.
Are you willing to endure some ridicule, to walk in the way that God directs even when it goes against conventional wisdom?
Are you willing to let Christ Jesus take your failures and use them as a means of teaching you to depend on Him more?

That's when a flop is not!