Failure makes me squirm. The thought of it brings about feelings of dread and over dramatic doom. In my mind, failure is something to be avoided at all costs. Or at least that used to be how I thought about it.
On the race, we frequently encourage each other in community to “do hard things.” Normally, this entails digging through your emotional closet to pull out and dust off things from your past and process them with the Lord. That earns the title “hard thing” because usually the things you find in that closet are “dark and twisty,” to quote Meredith Grey.
Before the race, and I mean before ever hearing about the race at all, I was NOT in tune with my emotions. They definitely came out of me, but I never paid much attention to what they looked like within me or made any effort to understand why I felt the way I did about a given thing. Fast forward to the phone call where I got accepted to the race, and join me in re-imagining the moment in which my interviewer told me that I was accepted on the condition that I read two books before training camp in October. It was the beginning of May, so I said it would be no problem to finish both of them. I thanked my interviewer and drove to Barnes&Noble on my lunch break 30 minutes later to buy both of the books.
All I can say looking back at my very naive, blissful self is “LOL.”
The books prescribed to me were Daring Greatly by Brene Brown and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero. The first one was a breeze, focusing on the emotion of shame and how to overcome it. At the time, I was convinced I hadn’t ever felt shame before. Once again…LOL. As my inner overachiever flipped open the cover to book number two, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (EHS for short), I told myself I would be done with it by the end of that week – a full FIVE months early. I was going to be the best world racer ever.
One paragraph in my confidence was already starting to rock. By the end of the introduction, I felt like I had been personally victimized by Peter Scazzero and his publishing company. The book I thought would take 3 days to read ended up taking the full five months between getting accepted for the race and training camp. I was finishing the final chapter an hour before check-in to camp started.
That poor book has taken a beating – from me personally. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thrown it against a wall or contemplated ripping pages out of it. That beautiful book talks about walking into emotional health and out of the victim’s circle. It talks about embracing failure, a concept which I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around. It speaks truth into admitting your mistakes and claiming responsibility for your actions, words, and emotions. It was a dose of maturity and health that I never knew existed, much less needed.
I am currently reading EHS for the third time through, this time with my team. We started a book club where the only rule is bring your own dessert. Little do they know that the dessert is a direct, albeit unhealthy, coping mechanism for the chapters to come (if you guys are reading this, spoiler alert). The reason I’ve read it twice and will continue to read it is because it has taught me so much about what living a balanced, healthy emotional life looks like and how to walk in that.
In this season of the race, I was asked to be a team leader. Pre-race, I craved leadership (or what I thought was leadership). All I really craved then was power and control because I genuinely lived my life thinking and subconsciously acting like I was better than everyone around me. I sound like a peachy person to be around, right?
I was served a huge dose of humility at training camp when we got assigned our first teams and all five other girls on my team had a role…except me. I was nothing. I was just Amanda, and I didn’t know who or what that was. We were blessed with necklaces that had keys on them at launch. On each key there is a hand stamped word that was prayed over by our leadership and inspired by the Lord. Much to my chagrin, my key said “be you.” I literally cried when I saw it because I didn’t know what that meant, but at the same time I felt a deep sense of longing and desire behind it as well. I wanted to “know myself that I might know God.” I mistakenly had believed that some philosopher that could put fancy words together had it right, but in reality, I needed to know God that I might know myself. Who is created in whose image after all?
By the end of month 4 when team changes rolled around, leadership was the last thing I wanted. I felt like I had found myself in the Lord and that we were safe in our secret, sacred place. Being exposed to the world and discovered looked like leadership. I didn’t want it. So of course that’s how the Lord challenged me to grow.
In the last month adjusting to a new role, I have grown already and also seen so many areas the Lord is challenging me to walk into. Re-enter failure, our old friend. Something I grew comfortable walking in for the first season of the race was vulnerability. I had nothing to lose because I wasn’t responsible for anything besides myself and no one was looking to me for anything (my perception during that time). In stepping into leadership, vulnerability once again became a scary and unsafe thing for me. How could I admit to people I was supposed to be leading that I was weak or broken? Aren’t leaders supposed to have their crap together?
Everything in this blog has been drawing a gigantic circle that is now coming back around on itself in this point: there are two types of fail-ers. Those who fail and wallow in their misery and blame everyone and everything around them. We’ll call them victims. Then there are those who fail, acknowledge their failure, get back up, and move on with their lives with one more piece of experience under their belts. We’ll call them victors.
In the last year, I had learned so many pieces to living life as a victor but never fully put them together until the Lord asked me to step into leadership and choose openly and willingly to do things I which failure is almost guaranteed. The race pretty much assures you to never be in control of your surroundings, never have set plans, never stick to what was originally scheduled, and never have a clue what’s going on next. My former self would have seized up in an all out anxiety attack just reading that sentence. I asked myself who would want to follow a leader without a plan.
The Lord convicted me and told me two things. I was being selfish and I was letting pride dictate my actions. Number one, I’m not the leader of my team. The Lord is. I am still charged with following. Number two, I am not the star of the show. The Lord is. My failures magnify His strength and allow me to grow in my trust for Him. He has challenged me to fail – not the unhealthy failure in which I remain a victim and point fingers for the rest of my life, but failing forward. Choosing to call myself a victor, and instead of letting my surroundings impact me, choosing to influence my surroundings. The Lord has declared freedom from bondage, joy, abundant life, and VICTORY over me and all of those things start with being willing and obedient, even unto failure.
