Failure Is Underrated

I am weary from my crying, my throat is parched, my eyes fail looking for my God. Psalm 69:3

Failure is underrated! We are taught all along the path of life that to fail is one of the things we must avoid at all costs. Our loss of self-esteem (which we have often not earned in the first place) is profound when we fail. If a kid fails to make the team, or the cheerleading squad, if we don’t get the job for which we interview, or our application to some prestigious institution of higher learning is not accepted, we suffer the pangs of failure. God forbid that during our teen-age years someone we are convinced we llove turns us away. That is failure to the highest degree.

People experience failure in multiple venues and myriad manners. It seems to be a part of the make-up of our lives. No matter how we attempt to avoid it, somewhere, sometime, it just jumps up and bites us.

I am going to proclaim that is good! There can be way too much failure in our lives, and way too many ways to fail, but a little failure is good. Why? Because I don’t know of a single mechanism that is quite as efficient for motivating us to success or victory in that at which we have failed or other pursuits that become more important. I need to stress that if we fail to learn from our failures, failure becomes a way of life, and we will continue to fail unrelentingly.

Sometimes (probably much more often than I am willing to admit) I fail to drive home, get across, successfully inculcate my point of view. It is that very failure that motivates me to learn new and/or different communication styles or variants. I often converse with people who are struggling in their marriage relationship and experience failure in their ability to communicate with each other or organize their affairs effectively. But it is out of those failures that they are driven to learn, adapt, grow and practice the disciplines of llove. Again, it is the failure that forces the change.

History is replete with figures who have experienced failure, some to a life-damaging degree, but have overcome the tide of despair to find triumph in some noble endeavor. We’re familiar with Moses of Old Testament fame, who found forty years of nothing but desert heat and smelly sheep before God used him for one of the greatest victories in human history. How many times did Abraham Lincoln suffer the rejection of the electorate before he led our nation through an un-civil war and became a national icon? On a smaller scale, look up how many times Thomas Edison failed at making a simple incandescent light, before tungsten sealed his place in history.
Failure is underrated! I’m willing to wager you know a bit about failure. You also know about success. Sometimes the latter springs from the former. One sure truth: you can rise from failure to incredible triumph. Believing that might put a whole new spin on your current failure.