Failure

For those of you who are good at math and understand a calendar, you'll notice that this post is late. It has been more than a week since my last post which was itself barely on time. This brings me to a topic with which I've become all too acquainted in recent years, failure. Now, don't get me wrong, its not that I didn't fail until a few years ago. I'm certain that I racked up my fair share of failures throughout my life. Its just that I wasn't all that acquainted with them. I think that the reason for this lack of acquaintance was a general lack of concern. I just didn't care about what I was failing at. Perhaps that is why I failed in the first place. The difference in recent years has been that I really did care about what I was doing, finally, and I failed anyway. Of course, I'm not talking about complete and utter failure, just some failures. Moving on...

Let's not kid ourselves. Failure hurts. It hurts our pride, our self image and, depending on the type of failure, it hurts others as well. But amid all that pain, there is a reality about failure that often goes unnoticed. It has been said that pain is the best teacher but in my experience, the pain of failure is the best of the best. Through my own failures I have learned more about myself, others and, most importantly, God than I have from any other source. To say that going through the pain of failure was unpleasant would be quite an understatement but in hindsight I would not give up that unpleasantness for all the tea in China. Not just because I don't like tea but because on the other side of that pain were lessons I don't believe I would have learned in any other way.

I learned that I am broken. Not that my failures and pain broke me but that I was already broken, I just didn't know it. I learned that that brokenness means that I am completely dependent on the grace of God to succeed and not fail. Again, not that this became the case but that this had always been the case, I was merely unaware of it. I am hopeful that these lessons are the beginning of true humility in my heart as this was a character trait I was sorely lacking. Just ask anyone who knew me before my depression. Humility would not be among the character traits they would have used to describe me. Not that I've achieved it yet but I'm hopeful that I'm growing into humility. If failure is what it takes to get there it is totally worth it.