Failing Well

The crinkled up, five-page paper had a big red “F” on the front of it. The best I could tell, the words the professor wrote across the front page were: Complete waste of time!

So it wasn’t my best work. My wife just had surgery on her knee. I led a ski trip with over one-hundred high school students and a dozen or so brave adults from Atlanta, Georgia to Sugar Mountain, North Carolina the weekend before the Monday the paper was due. Not to mention the Greek test I had to study for. It’s not like I had a lot of time or energy to write a profound discourse on Paul’s Second Missionary Journey and Its Implications for the Twenty-First Century Church.

I was defined by that “F” word again: Failure. It can shatter self-confidence. It can harden a heart. It can destroy dreams. It can lessen life.

It wasn’t the first time I failed. In high school I lost more wrestling matches than I won. I had seven girlfriends before I got married. I don’t know if all seven included me as their boyfriend, but it’s all good. I even managed to lose a couple thousand dollars on a fundraiser for the student ministry I once led.

And thankfully it wasn’t the last time I failed. I ended up in the hospital during the 2007 Boston Marathon. At my church in Dallas, I led a team who started a Friday night worship service for men and women in recovery. After six unsuccessful weeks, hundreds of hours of labor, and thousands of dollars of resources—we turned off our projectors and closed our doors for the last time.

And thankfully it wasn’t the last time I failed.

J.K. Rowling’s marriage ended in divorce, her parents wouldn’t claim her, and she lost all of her money. At the commencement address at Harvard University in 2008 she said: 

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free. I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so failure became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. 

Those little Harry Potter books she wrote were possible because of her failures.

Learning to fail well is an essential part of life. Failure is a necessary step to success and significance. Failure teaches courage, wisdom, humility, and perseverance like only failure can. God transforms our failures into things beautiful, profitable, and blessed. Failure should not be looked down on in life because sometimes it’s failure that makes a life. Tomorrow’s dreams are made possible by today’s failures.

The best is yet to come…

Craig