Mo Farah is not a Christian, yet in Rio on Saturday night he demonstrated something that we all could learn a lesson from – he got up again and carried on.

We all know what it is to fall.  We make mistakes ourselves, or like Mo, we get innocently tripped up by life.  Sometimes somebody deliberately trips us up.  But however it happens, we find ourselves on the floor.

Dazed, confused, hurt, our instinct can be to give up, thinking it’s all over.  Maybe we lash out, to try to regain some pride by implicating others, or look around for sympathy to make us feel better.

But Mo showed us what the Christian’s discipline should teach us: don’t mess around, just get up and start running again.  In a 100m race that would not be possible.  But in a distance race, there is time to make up lost ground.  And the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint.

The Bible is full of people who fell.  In a temper, Moses killed a man.  Out of fear, Peter denied he even knew Jesus.  Abraham, the man of faith, took events into his own hands rather than trusting in God.  But that isn’t what they’re remembered for, because they didn’t let failure become the final word.  They carried on.  There are many others who tripped up, but finished well.  Falling isn’t final.  It has been rightly observed:

Falling isn’t failure.  Failure is not getting up again.