The Way of Failure

For most of my life I have run away from any and all awareness of personal failure. At times this has included burning bridges, that is, turning my back on the people and projects that were the context for my failures.

As I have aged, this has become more difficult to do. Many of my failures have been as a parent and even I am not prepared to leave relationships with my grown children to avoid facing up to the ways I have injured them.

Seeing the hardships my failures have caused my children is exquisitely painful and the tempation is there continually to shrink away from the spotlight of truth. Holidays seem to be a good time for stirring up these issues.

So, I found myself this morning, cowering under the weight of all this - a weight, as I have said before, I often want to run away from. Of late I have adopted the practice each morning of asking Jesus to be "yoked" with Him. I imagine Jesus and I being harnessed together, and this morning I realized that the weight of my failure was something that Jesus was willing to help me bear. Of course, if I chose not to bear it by not acknowledging it, then Jesus would not help me carry it.

I felt God informing me that my failures were not excluded from the "things" in "God works all things together for good" and that owning them before God demonstrated my love and trust of God and thereby freed Him up to work even my failures out for good in the lives of those I have injured. This seemed too good to be true! Much of the gospel is - it isn't called the "good news" for nothing.

Further, I wondered if, from God's perspective, our failures are really any different than our successes. Although we feel much better about our successes in life, it is often our failures that being us closer to God, more dependent on God's grace and mercy. Is this maybe what Paul meant when he said, "when I am weak, then I am strong"?

So, while I do not welcome failure, I am called not to fear it. This should make me able to risk hoping for the future. As well, when I do fail, as is inevitable, I must walk through my failures, in fact, there is no other way around them.