Only Afraid Of Trying

This morning I watched my daughter fail, again. For Christmas, my mother-in-law bought her a ride on princess scooter/wagon type thing. (I'm clearly up to date on the latest you crazes.)  From the moment she opened the toy, my 15 month old daughter was thrilled. She's been running around, climbing on everything she can for a while now and loves being in the church nursery where they have a similar toy.  Once my wife put it together, I realized that my daughter wasn't able to climb up onto the seat because it was just higher than she could climb. When she's in the nursery at church, the volunteers help her on and off the scooter. So we helped her on and she played for about 20 minutes before we moved on with our day.  Then a few days later, while watching her play from the other room, I watched her attempting to get on top of the scooter by herself. She tried for about 10 minutes to get her leg over, tipping over and onto the carpet when she would fail.  As I tried to decide if I should help her, I looked more carefully at her face. She wasn't upset. Though she had fallen off a number of times, she simply composed herself and tried again. Then I watched as she finally was able to swing her leg over high enough and pulled herself on. The smile on her face...man, it was something.  It reminded me of a Camping Ministries class I took when I was a Youth Min major at Liberty University. We were learning new games and activities and we tried slack lining for the first time. For those who don't know what it is, here's a great example from 'The Office' (http://www.nbc.com/the-office/video/slacking-off/n27250) I climbed up and onto the line, took one step and ate dirt, flat on my face. Embarrassed around all my friends, I slipped back into the group and never tried it again.  Watching the persistence and determination of my daughter, I wondered: when do we lose the ability to try something new?  Too many of us are afraid to try something new or unfamiliar because we might fail. And yes, odds are we might. But we're supposed to. It's brand new! Of course it won't come as naturally or yield the results of something we've practiced over and over. That's what was so ironic about the amount of embarrassment I felt from my class. No one else was having tremendous success on their first go; we were all learning something new together. Let's resolve to to try new things. Let's resolve to be ok with being a novices. Let's resolve to be ok with knowing we have to start somewhere.