February 10, 2026
UGGGGGGHHHHH!!! I SOOOO WANT TO SMASH MY COMPUTER WITH A BAT!Have you ever been so entirely frustrated with your computer that you just want to SCREAM? That’s me, right now. Yet, amid all my frustrations, I’m still genuinely thankful for failure. Let me spin back the clock a few hours.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m embarking on a “sidecar project” to turn these daily blogs into everyday vlogs. Just as I’ve promised to you, God, and myself to write daily, I am making a similar promise to upload 365 days of video blogs about being thankful.
The thing is, I’m already two months into this written journey. For the sake of my online viewership (some of you have faithfully been reading these daily posts since the start!), I thought it felt disingenuous to begin the video content all the way back at Day 1. So, I started with yesterday’s topic: being thankful for the days I have remaining with my folks. (I posted that video to my YouTube channel if you wanna find it and watch it.)
That said, I hadn’t written today’s post until just now, which meant I didn’t have fresh content ready to record for tomorrow’s vlog. Considering tomorrow is Confirmation night at church, my time to record and edit will be limited. So, I decided to back up a few days and make a video based on my post about living in harmony (inspired by the Olympic opening ceremony).
Just before supper time, I recorded the video. In doing so, I brought in some clips from the opening ceremonies—specifically that moment when the aerialists were in the two rings that came close together, jumped into each other’s arms, and spun downward toward the ground. (Hopefully you saw it; it was cool!)
It was all going great. But, I also know how YouTube can be when it comes to copyrighted content, so I made sure to mute the audio portion of the Olympic clips. HOWEVER, the new software platform I’m trying out wasn’t playing nicely; it simply would not mute the audio on that track. After trying and trying (four times!), and the platform creating four separate bad video exports (that would all get flagged by YouTube), I tried to delete those exported files.
But instead of deleting just the exports, the darn platform deleted my entire project file. Now it’s gone. I feel like Charlie Brown, screaming at the world with his mouth wide open and tongue flailing about. If I had any amount of hair, I’d be pulling it out.
Breathe…
All this frustration aside, I am thankful for the failure because it taught me some hard-to-learn lessons. Because of that failure, I can learn from my mistakes and hopefully not make them again. If anything, failure is nothing more than an opportunity to learn and grow, to adjust tactics, and to try again. Perhaps God was trying to show me that I needed to just make new, original content instead of reusing what I wrote days ago. And while this topic is similar to one I wrote four days ago, failure is only failure when it causes us to quit.
Here’s a final thought. Solomon wrote:
“The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again.”
Thank you, God, for the opportunity to fail, and the opportunity to get up again. May we all learn lessons from our daily mistakes so that we can better the world tomorrow.