So Close to Striking Gold | Rabbi Gavriel Friedman

That was a quote from Thomas Edison. So many times in life, we try, we push ourselves, and maybe we don't make it. Or so we think. We don't realize how close we are. Keep pushing, don't stop. Don't give up. I want to share an amazing story that's told. True, false, I don't know. There was a guy by the name of R. U. Darby. This is during the times of the Gold Rush. And he had an uncle. And this uncle, he wanted to make mad cash along with everybody else. So he made his way out west. And he found it, he struck gold. He struck gold, and he really wanted to get that gold, so to get that ore out of the ground, you got to get a lot of machinery, a lot of equipment. And he raised the money to be able to get it, and he started making mint. Until it ran dry. And when it ran dry, they said: Well, let's keep trying. And they kept trying and they kept going deeper and deeper, but there was nothing left. And they figured: Alright, we got what we got. It's time to recoup our losses. So they sold their equipment to some guy who, you know, bought junk. And this guy who bought the junk, he went to look again at it. He called some professionals, they went down, they looked, and they said, The guy who gave up made a mistake. He doesn't understand how gold veins work. As a matter of fact, by my calculations, he was just a few feet off from a gold mine. This guy went back to work, using that advice, and he struck the biggest pot ever and he became a multi-multi-millionaire. You see, sometimes we're right next to success. We're right there. But then we go and we fall, we fail, and we go through these failures and we go through these challenges and we figure, I already messed up. It's already lost. I tried, it didn't work. Why keep going? The answer is because your very next attempt might be the biggest change that will take you to the top, top levels that you could ever attain. The Gemara says in Bava Basra in Daf 91, it tells a story about Boaz. And that Boaz had 60 children, 30 boys and 30 girls, and all of them died בחייו, they died in his lifetime. One might think, They all died. What's the point of going forward? Why would I continue? But he didn't stop. He then continued, and he had a relationship with someone by the name of Rus. They had a child, and that child was the great grandpa of Dovid HaMelech, which was then, God willing, בקרוב, we're going to have Moshiach. Moshiach comes from not giving up. We're right there. We have Nisyonos, we have challenges, and we may fail once, twice, 10 times, 30 times, 50 times, 60 times. But don't stop. Don't give up. Because the very next thing we do may actually bring Moshiach.