Introduction & Chapter 1

Introduction…
What is failure? You my friend are not the failure, the failure is a circumstance or disappointment…it is not a definition of who you are. You might beg to differ, I see you. Hang there for a while, and lets look a bit deeper into this whole realm before we beat ourselves with that familiar stick.
I expected this to be a pamphlet, a page or two on a few of the ‘God’ things we can draw out from a disastrous situation, instead I have discovered more and more goodness, gifts from a God who turns ashes into beauty. It seems I have vastly underestimated the generosity of God, and vastly underestimated the goodness that comes from failure, the beauty he has brought from a little suffering. This, I’m sure is not an exhaustive list of chapters.
Welcome friend, I think the same thing brought you here as brought me here to write it. I am still just about standing and still praising God having walked through an epic failure, one that has cost me friendships, my reputation and shook my faith. My prayer is that by exploring what has happened here, together we can try to understand the gifts God has given us in our storms, I know there will be many, and just why he permits those storms at all. Are you helplessly watching something precious slide ever so slowly towards the edge of a cliff, perhaps you are still lying flat on the floor, face down in humiliation or maybe you are the other side of a life changing battle that it seems you lost, despite everything you gave to save it, the bruises are a brown colour now, but you are still left wondering, “What was that all about?” Firstly let me explain that I’m writing this because I have questions to be answered too, and I haven’t yet found the book I need to read, so that seems a great invitation to write one. An incredibly brave opportunity to fail once again maybe? I hope I do it Justice, or I hope I do HIM justice. Because after all it will be His story running as a theme through ours.
I think it is always the questions He raises on our hearts that bring the best inspiration, the scriptures are full of them. Who do you say I am ? What are you doing here Elijah? Maybe our question starts with, I know God, you are good, then why…? It’s a question as old as existence and I don’t pretend that I am going to uncover anything that hasn’t already been explored and written about. I am not a learned theologian but I have failed many times and in many ways. This, my average and normal human experience gives me at least the question. It’s in our desire to understand just something of Gods mind that helps us to discover ourselves more fully too. Some or all or perhaps none of the gifts I cover will apply to your specific situation but we will be connected in the experience that it was not a pleasant, that in some way it hurt, and mostly we didn’t want it to happen and to bring about a peace of acceptance we need to see some purpose or fruit from it all. Above all don’t we just want to recover our Joy? By putting into words how we are changed or moved by an event gives it substance. When print meets paper those feelings become matter…..and they do matter. These experiences are part of our God story, so our words in writing take on flesh, brought to Him, THE word that became flesh. My page becomes the foot of the cross and the only place to put my confusion and questions down in anticipation of healing and maybe even an answer. If you don’t have your own page then I hope that this one becomes the foot of the cross for you.
Chapter 1 – What even is failure?
A normal human response would be when things don’t go to plan, something gets broken, lost, dramatically changed from the original vision. When there’s a better outcome, well that doesn’t count as a failure, that’s a blessing, unexpected maybe and one of those many times when we can look from a place of faith and say “wow, just look what the Lord has done”. Those times aren’t recalled as a failure, those are the times that God rescued you from the brink of disaster, how good is our God! Those times aren’t the reason you picked up this book. I suspect it’s the occasions where it feels you weren’t caught before you thudded to the ground, that you slipped through His fingers or weren’t seen in time to stop the disaster. Is it altruistic to want to see the purpose of the failure or to see there was a great benefit from the pain and disappointment of it? Maybe, and perhaps with many things the reasons remain hidden, sometimes for years and sometimes for ever. This is the very place we are asked to trust God. Secular failure looks very different to Christian failure. Failure by worldly standards can be a time of joy and celebration when lived under the wings of a great God. Giving up a well paid job to become a missionary, choosing to turn down opportunities for wealth or status because the source compromises your faith are seen very differently through the lens of a world whose successful benchmarks are lust, power and wealth. Those same things the serpent uses to tempt Eve, at the very beginning of our Story. If these are our bench marks for success then failure is going to be totally different to how The Lord would define it.
Christian failure is on the most foundational level a failure to love. This is always a failure, when we don’t love well it’s the biggest, fattest of fails. We may have many projects and initiatives that fail but we only fail as Christians by failing to love God or/and neighbour. Many, many, other failures will stem from this simple truth. This is the biggest challenge of the human experience, the simplest, yet the most hardest ask of all. We are in salubrious company though, the whole of scripture is human fail after human fail, a tragic love story of a God who pursues His beloved creation tirelessly, as they in that now broken humanity struggle to see Him as loving and good…..but Ill pause there, that’s not the end of the story.
Is failure really such a bad thing?
This is all going to be from a Christian perspective, I’m saying that now because if you hoped to find answers to why your get rich quick scheme or your quest to become famous didn’t work this time then you’ve picked up the wrong book, never mind, go see if you can get a refund…..or keep reading anyway who knows what may come, perhaps the answer to, even these human pursuits may lay through this little offering of “perhaps this is why”.
The world is full of books on how to survive secular failure, pick yourself up, believe in yourself, learn from it and off you go. What I’m offering here is coming from different perspective completely, that failure isn’t something that needs to be overcome to find our happiness but it’s the very vehicle that opens our hearts and drives us to where we are meant to be, that when we arrive there our souls are as prepared for heaven as any other saint. Just maybe our failure is as necessary for joy as the apparent good things we are given, like sunshine, chocolate and laughter. What if it’s not just for Joy but essential for our spiritual journey, to gain a deeper freedom, for a deeper union? How do I come to believe this could possibly be true? Well, there are many, many things I don’t know and a very few things I do know for sure,
God is good.
God is loving.
God is all powerful.
And all things are worked for our good and His Glory, I firmly believe in that order too. So if I have placed my life into His hands, the bad stuff, the stuff I want to avoid has hidden gifts for my good and His glory too.
“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:9-11
I bring Him way more glory from embracing the hard things than I do the rewards and successes. It’s right here that I can say, I profess to Love you Lord, not for the gifts, the good feels, those great consolations you give me in prayer, the warmth of feeling loved or forgiven, but I love you because you are my God. We are in this till I meet you face to face, thick and thin times. But I also know that you love me, beyond how I can love you and that when I doubt these truths of your goodness, you don’t give up, you remain constant and unyielding in your desire for my heart to be in line with yours. For me to fully know you as I am fully known.[1]
Finding Him in that hard place
One of the most profound memories I will always carry from a trip to the Holy land was our drive through the desert. I asked the priest driving our minibus, “Will I know it’s the desert?” I so wanted to see the desert, I guess there was a yearning for it in a way that had yet to unfold in prayer. I also had a feeling somewhere I might be disappointed, that it would not look as I had pictured it. That it would have been Disneyed up and you get the feel and the sense of it with the real danger and adventure stripped out, dulled and sanitised to make it comfortable and safe. “Oh you’ll know it’s the desert” he said, I know this man of God well, I knew he meant it on several levels. As we drove nearer, the lush green of Tiberius, slowly began to be replaced with lower shrubbier plants, which started to become further and further apart. We were approaching the desert, there was no mistaking it. We parked up beside the River Jordan, walked in the waters where John baptised Jesus, renewed our baptismal promises and ate some lunch. It was very moving and special but that wasn’t the THING, that wasn’t what God wanted me to discover there. I sat on the steps looking out over what? There was nothing to see, it was barren, hard, unrelenting, my face burnt in the first ten minutes even with bandage factor sun cream. But there was something breathtakingly beautiful about it, people being baptised just a few yards away was something incredible, but that wasn’t it. What made my heart pound so loudly about this hostile, dry, featureless landscape? Back to the Holy Priest, “It’s where you find God” He says,” that’s the beauty of it”. I’d thought of the temptation story as we had set out, but the picture in my head, probably from a children’s picture bible, as the place where Satan dwells. In a place where there seems nowhere to hide, the evil one had hidden, waiting to jump out on a weary, hungry Jesus, who only because he was God was able to kick him into touch. This is much how I pictured struggle and failure too. As exposed, vulnerable and weakened by all the effort to prevent the inevitable fold and become easy pickings for the evil one. Since I am not God I would have little or no chance of staying strong in the face of any temptations. I would be doomed to fail. But let’s read it again paying attention to the first part..
“1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” 4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” 5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6 “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ ” 7 Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’” 11 Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.Matthew 4:1-11
Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, meets Satan at the end of the forty days. What was happening in those forty days? In those forty days he was stripped of every comfort, every refuge and importantly every distraction from the discomfort. He had nothing but the presence of God. This time spent only with the Father and the Spirit made him stronger than before the time of hardship not as you’d think, weaker. And yes it was here in the hard place he had profoundly met His Father. And it was here he had received all He needed for the next part of the journey.
Failure is hard and painful
There I’ve said it. Our bid to avoid it at any cost is because of this reason. Why is it so painful? Because we have given a piece of ourselves to something that hasn’t turned out the way we had hoped for, or aimed for, or strived for. It sounds obvious maybe, but sometimes we miss the obvious. It isn’t any less painful if the failure is down to us, others or just circumstances. We don’t have the outcome we invested ourselves for. It does become more painful the more we have invested though, doesn’t it? If I’ve half-heartedly revised for an exam, I’m disappointed if I fail, but not as much as if I’ve given everything I have to pass it and still not got the result. This is a “not good enough” slap. This is a ‘I really don’t have what it takes’ punch to the gut. I’ve put myself out there and now I look like a fool. It’s not true, but it’s an understandable and honest emotion. The next time, well we don’t want to aim so high, we start to believe we are the sum of our failures and not the sum of the Fathers love for us. The pain comes from ‘I made myself vulnerable, I showed up, and yet God has allowed this to fail, I don’t deserve this, I deserve the win’ The paradox is, if we haven’t tried and failed, then the greater gifts that come from the failure we are going to fail to receive! ok lets put that in simpler terms…. We invest ourselves into something, something small, like baking, we don’t go all out, perhaps we buy a packet mix, throw it in and drop the little cakes off for the bake sale, no surprise they are the last ones left to be purchased. Twang of guilt perhaps that you didn’t put more effort in and help raise more funds for the cause, but you were just showing up.
The sense of failure is comparative with the effort and investment. Now imagine you’ve baked all day, iced the cake, bought the best of ingredients, made the whole thing with care and attention. If this is the cake that doesn’t sell your sense of failure and hurt is much bigger, of course. In the earthly world that’s exactly what’s happened, you’re just hurt and you won’t put so much in the next time there’s a cake sale, in fact you may not bother at all. Cakes are a simple example, but imagine this was your marriage. It’s not so possible to shrug off as a maybe next time.
We live with one foot in another world, a world where the bigger the failure, the bigger the gift we are going to receive from it, due to the fact that when we give of ourselves to the right things it is always rewarded. It’s a sacrificial thing, but we have to purify the giving so the sacrifice brings life, maybe a leap too far already, but in that failure our giving is being purified. There’s no greater model of perfect and pure sacrificial giving than the cross, and even that, to an onlooker appears the biggest failure in History, that is until we see what God does with it. Don’t worry we will come definitely come back to that later in the book.
Failure is Unavoidable
Failure my friends is unavoidable. If failure and struggle is the vehicle that drives us forward then without it we remain static, stationary and stuck. This is a non growth situation. There is an intriguing picture called the Ladder of Divine ascent. It shows people on a ladder moving towards heaven, however there are many demons pulling off the faithful as they climb. When we are static we are an easy target, moving targets are always more difficult to pick off. If the target is moving down the ladder, then there’s really no need to bother picking him off at all, If he’s standing still, there’s no challenge and hes no threat to the others plans, to take him out of the game before he should start to climb is a safe and easy job. The one however who is on the escalator of trial and failure, he’s a target alright but much less likely to be hit.
Remember God is good? That all things are for our good and His Glory? Well it’s for our good to keep moving up that ladder, so if you aren’t moving forward, it’s in our very best interests that something drives us forward. Yes its uphill, yes we feel safe and comfortable where we are, but we aren’t and a loving God knows that. He knows what awaits at the top of the climb is worth the effort and the struggle, He knows because it’s what he created you for. So if you aren’t putting yourself forward He will have to do it for you. He simply adores you too much to leave you at the mercy of the enemies arrows. I don’t know how you feel about heights, we are all created unique, but when I’m approaching the top of a ladder it feels less and less comfortable the higher I go, but I am fully aware that the safety of the platform is only reached by way of the ladder.
Failure is repeatable.
We can and will repeat the same failures and we will fail on new things too. This is great news, no really it is! If it’s a new failure then there’s a new gift of learning to be opened, if it’s the same failure, then there’s a deepening of the understanding of the the old gift you’ve maybe already opened or maybe there’s something more in the bottom of the gift box you hadn’t seen. Either way there is always more to be had from the experience of your ride on the failure train. If our failures are sins, we gain a deeper understanding of the Mercy of God, a deeper understanding of our awareness of our poverty and need of His grace. If they are result of someone else’s failure then you learn to be merciful yourself. We will look at what the Lord may be giving you more deeply as gifts in the following chapters. Sometimes we just need to be humble enough to say, ‘I wasn’t listening to what God was telling me’ or ‘I wanted my will above His’, these are some of the hardest times of failing to deal with as we are in battle with our very own creator, these battles bring the biggest falls but, oh my, don’t they bring the biggest of blessings when our eyes are opened.
Failure can be unpredictable and unexpected.
By its very nature, if we see it coming we can often prevent it happening. We naturally fix our eyes on the horizon and head for that place, we can’t look to the floor and to the horizon at the same time, our eyes and hearts aren’t made like that. We would need to be a little more Picasso for that to work, Slightly distorted. Our God made us perfectly though, so we are clearly not meant for that dual focus. We can glance down and back up again but our focus always stays on one place at a time. Either on the steps we are taking or the place we are heading. This isn’t a mistake in our design, it’s the very thing that leads us to seek an all seeing guide. When we fix our eyes on the horizon we are missing the pits and falls on our path, and when we fix our eyes downward on the path we lose the direction we are heading to. Each pit or wrong turn strengthens our knowledge that we can do nothing without him. Each failure serves to draw our eyes back to the one who made the journey, the path and the horizon, all for the joy or seeing us walk it towards Him and with Him.
Facing our failures.
There’s not much the Lord can bring out of our failures if we are still in a place of denial and evasion that they were failures at all. There’s something surprisingly refreshing about honestly facing and admitting it failed. Whatever the IT is that it hasn’t worked out. Try saying it, when we bring anything into the light it loses power over us because we have given it to Christ who is the light, when we name something we have dominion over it. I think we so love the happy ending we wait to share we were ever in a hard place, or at least until the happy ever after is reached. It takes so much longer to reach when we try to go it alone. I found such freedom and peace from being able to say “It has all gone horribly wrong, I’d appreciate your prayers right now” It is easier than you think. It’s liberating always to stand in truth, even painful truth. In the spirit of practicing what I preach I’m going to share some of my minor failures and the bigger ones that have led me to be sat here seeking where the Lord is blessing me.