Can we talk about failure for a minute?
I know. Yikes. But I have some thoughts. And I wanted to put them to paper/computer screen.
See, I go home in one month. I’m going home, planning on moving somewhere and getting a job in that “somewhere”, along with maybe some friends and maybe I’ll even find a nice restaurant I want to frequent weekly. As I look at stepping out of the community I’ve known for 5 years now – 4 years of a crazy good college community and now this Race community for a year…I’m afraid of failing on my own.
And you know what? To add to that, I’ve failed a lot this year. I have watched many of my closest people fail, and fail HARD. Lord, what do I do in the face of failure? What do I do when the past is littered with failings and the present is overwhelmed by failed conversations and relationships and the future seems to be a web full of potential for even more failure?
Who WANTS to fail? Who wakes up in the morning saying, “Man, I can’t wait to see how I fail today”? No one I know, that’s for sure. That’s why we have savings accounts and retirement funds and back up plans for a Friday night. Because we want security if we do fail…we want to know that we don’t have to fear failure because we have all these back up systems in place if things don’t go like we want them to (which isn’t always bad…but go with me here).
We fear how people will look at us when we fail. We fear that we will lose credibility and respect. We fear lack of forgiveness. We fear rejection. We fear our dreams dying. We fear the loneliness that might creep in when no one else is willing to sit with us in our failure. Our heart’s desire is to be accepted and loved and seen and failure seems like this big scary road block to all those good things.
We fear. And we fear. And we fear the suffering that comes with failure because it hurts and we want to be comfortable heeelloooooooo. Then before you know it we’ve shut down and we’ve drowned out Grace and Love and Bravery and we’ve stopped fully living- and listen here, I’m about zero percent interested in THAT.
Listening to a sermon this week, these words came rolling into my heart like an avalanche; words I knew, but wasn’t fully living by.
“Failure was never designed to define us, failure was given to us to shape us.”
It’s a painful shaping, no doubt about that. But, Jesus made it pretty clear that momentary (in the scope of eternity) suffering was a part of the deal. And He also made it clear that the suffering we endured in His name would never be in vain. That our suffering would, if we’d let it, draw us nearer to His heart, and show us a greater picture of what His Kingdom is (on top of glorifying Him always).
To Love the Creator of Everything, to know His character- that means our failures always fall on His Throne, no matter how far and scary the freefall is. And guess what? His throne is chock-full of all the depths of Grace we could never imagine.
So I have a wild thought: let’s be people who go cliff jumping once/five/twenty times a year; people who love others without ceasing, even when the same love might not be returned; people who are brave enough to have hard conversations, even when our words are messy and jumbled; let’s be people who take the risks to go after our dreams and start companies and nonprofits and restaurants and families. LET’S LIVE A LITTLE!! And we’ll rack up some big, hairy failures along the way. And we’ll love each other through it all because we’ll all be failing and succeeding and doing this Kingdom thing together as the Church Jesus always talked about. It’ll be great, I know it!
I believe it is in the aching moments of failure that we meet a part of God we can meet nowhere else. So let’s get crazy and all pray for some failure this morning! More than that, let’s pray that in the inevitable failures of our life He’ll meet us and strengthen us and show us His immense goodness.
