This weekend I visited the Capistrano Mission of San Juan.  Everywhere I looked I saw the remnants of people’s leagacies.  Stone walls, monuments, a valuted chapel, natural gardens, functional buildings and lastly the “Great Stone Church”.  Any one of the landmarks of the mission held a great deal of history and spoke of traditions and customs of the people who created them.  As I walked around the grounds of the mission I noticed how many of the landmarks were being preserved or restored using scientific and creative meathods.  At least to someone, the legacies that remained were worth holding on to….worth bring life to.

However, there was one landmark that wasn’t getting any apparent attention.  It was the “Great Stone Church.”  A magnificent building that was errected to be a worship gathering place for the Native Americans that called the land surrounding the mission home.  Why was this building not being restored?  A few years after the building was finished an earthquake struck the mission and the walls and celiing of the church fell on the worshipers during a Sunday service!

What does this say of the legacy left by the Great Stone Church?  A failure?  A memorial?  A lesson learned?  The answer is, “Yes!”

Just because we are met with failure, it doesn’t mean that we should try and repeat the same process hoping for better results (see for reference the defiinition of insanity). 

Failure requires a pause.  A pause to adjust. 

Failure requests us to reflect.  A reflection on the past in order to prepare for the future.

Failure demands an answer.  An answer to, “What have we learned?”

The people of the mission went back to using the old chapel.  In their case, maybe bigger wasn’t really all that necessary.