Growing opportunities

I stayed up far to late watching the Oscars live from LA. It didn't start here in the UK till around 12:30 am Monday morning. It was good to see the brits represented well yet again.

Helen Mirren won Best Actress award for her role as The Queen. During the evening she was quoted as saying that "The disasters in her life had been more important than the successes."

We really don't like it when things go wrong. Sometimes we blame ourselves, sometimes we blame others and sometimes we blame God. We want to fix oe get out or away from the problem as quickly as possible. We try various things to help us forget about the problem. But the last thing we often fail to do is learn from the problem.

Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, once said that the mark of a great was how they reacted to adversity, how they reacted to a loosing a game. He said that he learned more about his players when things were going bad than when they were great.

Rick Warren has said that God never wastes a hurt! I also remember an old Dana song which had a line in. "Life is like a tapestry and we need dark colours to contrast with the bright.

Its great when things are going well and you feel like you could take on the world but its good to remember we can learn and grow in every situation.