Dear Failure,
It’s been awhile since I’ve written. You’ve probably liked it that way. But I’d like to take a minute and define our relationship. Here’s where I think we stand:
You’re my worst nightmare. I’ve been told all my life that if I believe in something hard enough, I can accomplish anything. I feel your pressure to accomplish. Anything. Everything. As soon as I experience success, you’re right there next to me, saying, “Bet you can’t do that again.” Or, “nice job this time, but you’ll need to wow them more next time.” Or, “Way to go, but do you think it was good as so and so?” So there you are, warping my perspectives, even my successes, in my American context that fuels your convincing fire.
You’re way too big. I want to get rid of you. I try to pretend you are wimpy, that you’re just an obstacle to overcome or a lemon that can be harnessed into lemonade. Rugged individualism tells me that what won’t kill me will make me stronger. Yep, I eat failure for breakfast. The problem is, you never go away. There always seem to be more obstacles. More lemons. I’m getting tired (and my bladder is really full).
You don’t shut up. My personal history has preserved your message. I try to shut you out so I can’t hear your recurring words speaking to me through familiar voices from my past. I pretend that it doesn’t bother me, but these voices find their way to some of the deepest parts of my soul, whispering your bitter words. “Your failure defines you.” “You may believe you’re fine now, but I know what you’re really like.” “Those good things you do look great, but I’m making you do them out of fear of me, out of anger to prove me wrong. You can’t shut me out with your good deeds; I’ll use them to make me even stronger, to haunt you even more.” How do I get you out of my head? Or is it impossible? It’s like someone telling me not to think of the color blue.
You’re an evangelist. You have even succeeded (failure is successful!) by getting me to believe in a different god and savior. I’ve been lulled into treating god as the one who makes the pain go away or gets me the job or makes it all better. You’ve convinced me that happiness is the greatest goal and that struggle isn’t real; it’s just “God closing the door because there’s something bigger for me.” What if struggle is the bigger thing?
Honestly, I get frustrated with God that God doesn’t just take you out. After all, aren’t Christians supposed to live victorious lives? Small groups would be so much more popular if people didn’t need to share their failures. The god of your church has people who are always “fine,” with a few daring to ask others to pray that they “have more patience.” You’ve succeeded to lull me and our Christian communities into groups that avoid talking about you for fear we find out that you really exist in all our lives. Therefore, we hide from each other and from ourselves. Nice job.
You exist. I don’t want to believe in you, but I’m choosing to. In fact, I’m going to love you. Yes, you’re lovable. Maybe, if I can embrace you, I’ll understand you and put you in your proper place. Therefore, I’m going to choose to think about you this way:
You are a reminder of my limitations but not a definer of my person. I know I can’t do everything perfectly, but I am called to live faithfully. I will not let you define who I am, but I think you can help me remember that I’m not made to do it all.
You are my limp, not my cancer. You highlight my natural limitations that aren’t burdensome but liberating. This freedom allows me to celebrate, not compare. It allows me to extend grace to others and to myself. You’re a limp that reminds me, not a cancer that kills me.
You are my teacher, not my excuse. I will seek to learn from you. You have something to tell me when I do experience you in my life. I will resist seeing you as an exception to blame someone else or excuse my responsibility.
You are my cheerleader, not my heckler. When you remind me that I have failed, I will choose to hear, “Good job, you took a risk!” rather than, “Told you so.” You are my gauge that celebrates risks and keeps me from playing life too safe.
My sense is that you’re not going to like this letter because it’s written directly to you, and I think you prefer a more stealthy relationship. My hope is that if I can be honest with you, I can be honest with others and get on living life the way I’m created to live it. See you soon.
Your friend,
Steve
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I fail a lot. I fail at being a good mom, a good wife, at saying “I’m sorry,” at thinking of others before myself. I fail at paying attention to what God is doing, to the needs around me. I fail at remembering names, and I always fail at remembering numbers. I also fail at making deadlines…a lot. Just ask all my editors.
Let me just say loudly, I hate to fail. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life trying hard—really, really hard—not to fail, yet I’ve been programmed most of my life to equate doing anything wrong, any little screw up, missed opportunity, or even a missed phone call or deadline, with failure. My view of failure has been one of the primary parts of my life. If we’re going to be friends, then you need to understand that this is how I see the world.
Is it possible that we can relate to all people simply on how they define failure?
My first full-time ministry job left me feeling like a failure. I was on a large church staff, my husband was also on staff, and it was my first job back after having a baby. At that point in my life, it wasn’t easy for me to tell the truth to people in authority and not easy for me to say I had a problem with something. So I wrote a letter to my supervisors and told them my frustrations with my job and why my job needed to change in order for me to continue doing it. I wasn’t looking to leave my job; I was just getting stuff out on paper. This was back in the dark ages of the early ’90s, before email. The result of that heart-pouring letter was…I got fired.
I felt like a complete and utter failure. The way it was handled was horrific, and we had to move because we couldn’t afford to live on just one salary. But more than that, I questioned my call to ministry. Had I totally missed it?
Twenty years later, I can safely say that I know myself better, and I know what Bill Cosby means when he says, “I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
What is it about failure we just don’t like? Or we just can’t stand? I hate to fail, yet I fail all the time. Doesn’t that seem stupid? I failed at getting this post in on time. How we define failure and who defines failure determines our view of our lives; and how we learn to love or hate it.
Many of us equate failure with pain. If I fail this test I’ll get in trouble with my parents, or I won’t make the grades I need to go to the college I want. Or, If I fail to pull off this event, this retreat, I won’t get the raise or get the props or get the praise I want/need.
I was programmed to strive for perfection in my family of origin. I was the performing firstborn who tended to do the right things and in the right order. I was driven to perform well; not to fail.
The sad thing is that my drivenness came from a dad who said, ”It’s a 99, why isn’t it 100?” when I showed him my report card. So I’ve spent much of my life striving for that 100.
Yet we all know in our heads that only God makes 100s; people do not (not to mention that God doesn’t have a big grade book in the sky). People mess up, screw up, and fall flat on their faces. All the time. It’s what people do. It’s one of the things that makes us human. The beauty is that we can get up and start over. We get to say we’re sorry and start over.
That’s one of the best gifts I can give my kids and my family, both at home and in my church—to say I screwed up, I was wrong, I handled that badly. And on my good days I even get to acknowledge that it might take them a while to forgive.
How we define failure and who we’ve allowed to define failure for us determines how we view failing. We allow other people to define failure for us—most often our parents. Or it’s the invisible “they.” If “they” define failure for us, then we can blame them and not take responsibility.
We tend to run from failure because we equate failure with pain. And we define pain as bad, instead of as a gift. We believe failure is bad, not good. If we believe that failure equals pain, then we will do whatever it takes to avoid failing because we don’t want to hurt. But what if pain is not my enemy? Pain can be my friend. Wouldn’t this change a lot in how and why we do things?
What definitions are we passing along to our kids and students? What are our everyday definitions of failure, and how are these affecting how we live our lives?
• We need to redefine failure so we don’t see it as only painful.
• If we are free to fail and free of the pain we feel when we fail, then all bets are off. What if we engage our common humanity, accept failure as just human, normal?
• We—you and I—get to choose how a mess-up affects us.
Is failure is an opportunity? Can we see failure as a gift, not a curse?
In the movie A Good Year, Uncle Henry Skinner says to young Max, “You’ll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. Not least of which is, how much more enjoyable it is to win. It’s inevitable to lose now and again. The trick is not to make a habit of it.”
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Failure really is no fun, but it is entertaining. I bet we could create quite a list of failures in ministry—failed games, failed events, etc. Some of my favorite youth ministry stories are stories of failure.
Like the story of my student Derek, who decided one night at a lock-in to play the game “break-in.” The idea was simple: young people divided into teams with the first team to break into the church winning. The kids loved it, but after a neighbor saw some kids trying to pull open a window, she called the police. My student, the intern youth pastor, next saw his student in the back of a squad car. That’s a failure, and a funny one.
Such failures are embarrassing and difficult in the moment but are great fodder for entertaining stories because they reveal that we’re human and that we’re not perfect. Embarrassment has an uncomfortable way of reminding us that we’re fallible. We love to hear of others’ embarrassment because it assures us we’re not alone with our failures and finitude—and maybe it’s just plain funny.
Now, of course, failure can be amusingly funny, but it also can be no joking matter. Leaving a group of young people because of a failure of discretion, or realizing that you failed to properly interpret your fit can be very, very painful. There are so many people who have hard feelings toward the church after working in it. And it is so painful because these failures forcefully remind us that we’re human—in fact, that we’ll die.
Failure feels like death; it can communicate that we’re not worth much; we might as well be dead because we’re worthless—at least at this task. And this often cuts even deeper because we’d felt like we were called to this task, like God had assigned it to us, and we either failed God or God failed us—either one is deeply painful.
So how do we deal with failure? I hesitate to answer this, for fear that I’ll start sounding like some self-help loser, trying to convince people that “failure is just the first opportunity for a new success” or something lame like that. Because anyone who has experienced real failure knows it is only the dark pit of hell. Plus, that sentimental crap is almost always the speech of winners; only the person who has mastered success can look back nostalgically at her failures. For those in failure, it’s just a heavy burden.
And what’s interesting is that the biblical narrative is filled with losers and failures. And not as counter examples, not as signs for why you should follow Yahweh so you can avoid failure. Rather, the crazy thing about the biblical text is that its central figures—its heroes, if you will—are failures. From infertile Sarah and Abraham to stuttering Moses to little David to the peasant Jesus from Godforsaken Galilee. It seems that the God of Israel likes losers; after all, Israel itself is qualified to be God’s people because they are small and insignificant. They are failures.
So I want to make an argument that I hope won’t be misconstrued or confusing—but I think the God of Israel is a God who embraces failure, who actually uses failure as the fuel for God’s own action in the world. I know, I know that this could be misused or misunderstood, opening up to some pretty crappy abusive practices—but honestly, so can making success the measure of God’s activity. So let me explain.
Throughout the biblical story, you have a God who acts from what theologians call ex nihilo, out of nothing. What this means is that God is not dependent on anything in creation or humanity to act, that God creates life out of nothing. Not only is creation ex nihilo, but from the ex nihilo of Sarah’s womb comes Isaac; from the ex nihilo of the virgin womb comes Jesus. God takes what is nothing, what is dead, and brings forth life.
I’m actually quite convinced that the Christian story is the story of a God who takes all that is dead, placing Godself in death, so that life might spring ex nihilo, out of death. God, throughout the biblical story, moves from death to life. If that is so, it is no wonder that this God, who places Godself in death, uses failures and losers—those with nothing, those knowing nothingness—to be God’s instruments and vehicles in the world.
So how do you deal with failure? Not by looking on the bright side; that’s just an optimistic candy coating that makes the failure go down easier. No, the way to deal with failure is grieve the hell out of it; to feel it; to be angry about it; to cry and cry; to be brave enough to get inside it and know it; and then, to take it and seek God in it because this God takes what is dead and brings forth life. The way to deal with failure is to trust in prayer, anger, hope, and fear that the God of failure will move out of our failure. Don’t make failure good; it isn’t (even the funny stuff). But in its horror, in its pain, seek God, knowing that this God promises to be present where there is failure, suffering, and death. This God takes failure into Godself so that from the darkness of reality, a light of life might break in.
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