Failure is a Great Reminder

Failure. Why are we so afraid of it?  I am a person who absolutely hates failure; I hate being told things aren't good enough; I fear it.  But this week I was reminded it is in fact one of the greatest reminders one could ask for (or not in some cases).

This week I made a MAJOR scheduling conflict, affecting 2 completely separate important events.  For those who don't know me, you may think, 'oh, well that happens', but for me, no.  I love being the person everyone can count on; I love being the person people call if something needs to get done; I relish being that reliable person.  This scheduling conflict had so many reminders built into it.  Let me explain a few you may be able to relate to as well:

1. We may be great, but God is greater.

I have a love/hate relationship with this concept.  I love being great, but the moment I think I am great I have a God-smack moment.  You know, the moment God smacks you across the face and says, 'Hello!'  I often laugh at these moments after the fact, realizing how crazy I am to think how awesome I am without putting it into the greater perspective of how awesome God is.  Maybe you have been God-smacked.  I am smacked on frequent occasions and every time, it's no fun at first, but refreshing in the end.

2. Failure is the way to learn and a way to remember we are not God

How easy would it be for all of us to never make mistakes: we would never have to worry about disappointing anyone, never worry about an exam or meeting, never forget anything, ever again.  This looks pretty good, but if this were the case, WE WOULD BE GOD!  As stated above, I hate failing, but at the end of the day I love what it does: it helps me learn.  Even if the only thing I learn is I am not God, the failure is worth it.  I am learning to love failure because it will always lead to better things.

3. We need help.

One of the things I have always struggled with are thoughts like, 'I have arrived', 'I know all', 'my way is the best way'.  Yes, I have and continue to struggle with this to the extent of not praying because I don't think I need God!  It's true, this is me.  After I have failed it's an incredible reminder I have NOT arrived, know all, or know best.  I in fact need help, not just from God, but others as well.  I would tend to bet if you were truly honest with yourself there are some of these thoughts in your head right now.  Failure is a good way of bringing us back to truth: we need help.

4. We need others.

My primary love language (see The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman) is words of affirmation.  More often than not after I have failed I go into isolation.  Why?  I don't feel myself to be worthy of people because of this failure, even if it is the most seemingly insignificant mistake.  If I didn't have others I would probably stay in that isolated state.  What I need is words of affirmation from others.  I can tell you the thing I wanted the most after this specific failure was for someone, anyone, to tell me I am still a great person.  In this case it was my lovely wife and mother who gave me these words, the two people I actually failed.


I am sure there are other reminders that come through each failure, but these are the one's I think are the most important.  If we fail, yes we should ask for forgiveness where needed, but we should remember at the very least there is a God who continues to accept us, no matter what the failure.  Jesus came to earth to die for us, so our failures would not be held against us.  Take each failure as a reminder of how much we need God because we NEED God, a lot.

Failure is becoming less a fear of mine.  It's becoming more of an expectation because I am not perfect, far from it.  Through each failure I am trying to learn, something, anything, even something so small, because if there is nothing for me to learn then I don't need God.  For me to believe that would be catastrophic, so I choose to believe, be reminded, and admit I need help.

I am always thankful for failure in the end.  Sometimes it's painful, but this is good.


That's it.


Thoughts are of course always welcome.

Acceptance or Judgement?

The need is clear in my mind for all of us.  We need to judge less.  I catch myself time and time again talking to my wife about someone for 5, 10, 15 minutes and at the end of it realize I have been judging that person the entire time; by something this person said, or did, or just who this person is.  Ridiculous, I know.

This got me thinking of why we are so judgmental.  To me its pretty simple: we get judged by everything we do on a regular basis.  Our work is judged by a boss or supervisor; we get judged by how well we cook by people telling us if it's good or not; we get judged by how we are dressed; we get judged by our speech, whether we are tactful or not.  It's no wonder why we judge others, we ourselves get judged all the time.

It is really tough to categorize judgment.  When is it needed?  When is it not?  How do we exercise it?

I really like things simple.  I try hard to live a simple life, not complicated by unnecessary things.  So, here is my simple assessment of judgment.  It is really not our place in any way to judge people unless they themselves ask for it.  If we are going to judge ourselves that is our choice (I do believe we need a healthy view of ourselves), but we have no right to judge another person (outside of a work environment, but even here we tend to judge not performance, but the person, sad but true).

This world is too full of people giving their opinions on people who have no business giving an opinion at all.  We see a person like this or like that and we say out loud something critical that brings judgement on that person.

No where is this more prevalent than inside the church.  We give critiques on how loud music is, or how long the message is, or we don't like how this person acts and the list goes on and on.  More often than not we give our opinion of things and call it fact, but really it's just unnecessary judgement of a person.  I personally fell prey to this on Sunday morning this past week.  I won't get into the specifics,  but I judged heavily and gave my opinion on a matter as what would be best and who did it help?  No one.

The reality is we pass judgement on another person because it is easier to look at what someone else needs to change instead of what we need to change in our own lives; we judge because sometimes we are afraid if we had a healthy view of ourselves we wouldn't like what we see.  So, instead of investing in a healthy view of ourselves we just look at others and tell them the ways they ought to change; the things they need to improve upon.

Jesus tells us not to judge others because the standard we hold others to will be the standard we will be held to (see Matthew 7).  To me, that's sobering.  Not only is Jesus telling us not to judge, but He also does it (see John 4).

Maybe instead of judging others we should start accepting them as they are knowing we don't have things together either.  Maybe what is needed is not more fixing others, but more looking at ourselves and seeing we have this massive 2x4 log sticking out of our eye and we need to take care of that before we tell others what they need to fix.  Maybe this is Jesus' way of saying, you have no right to judge anyone because you will never be perfect enough to judge.  Maybe this is just another way of saying we don't think Jesus is enough, so we judge thinking we are helping Him (just ludicrous, but this is primarily what is at the heart of judgement).

We judge way too much.  We need to stop.  We are not helping others by telling them what they are doing wrong, we are just doing more damage.

We need not be afraid of looking at ourselves and getting healthy.  The more we start to get healthy ourselves I can guarantee the less we will judge.


Thoughts are of course always welcome.