“Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor abandon you.” ~Deuteronomy 31:8 NLT
FAILURE!
What a challenging word for most people I know in this thing called the journey of life and faith. It conjures up such negative thoughts like “LOSER” or “DISAPPOINTMENT” or “PATHETIC”! In a culture so geared to success and prosperity we often regard the idea or concept of failure as something to avoid, as something to be feared, as something to negative!
Most of my life, childhood and adult life, I have been predominantly taught through nurture and the culture surrounding me that failure is a bad thing and reflects poorly label you with those words in the previous paragraph! In our western world society we esteem the successful and loathe the failures! We applaud the victorious but turn our backs on the losers in life!
Personally, because of this overarching reality in our culture many of us, including myself, have grown to think and understand that we need to avoid failing by all means possible. So we either do one of two things! We avoid trying anything new at the risk that we might actually fail. Or we lie to ourselves and those around us about our accomplishments (or lack thereof) in order to avoid carrying the mantle of shame known as FAILURE!
Recently I have had many conversations with some great friends and people I have the privilege of walking alongside and the central focus of these discussions has been this issue… the issue of how to properly understand FAILURE. You see, failure is not a negative thing in and of itself, as most successful people will tell you; it is a cornerstone to success and victory in life!
Roger Van Oech, creativity theorist, writer, speaker, consultant, and inventor is often quoted as saying…
“Most people think of success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both products of the same process.”
The reality is the law of FAILURE is one of the most powerful of all success laws in the journey of life and faith. The truth is, we ALL fail in different ways along the way! No one, and I honestly mean “NO ONE” is immune to failure! That is unless we simply allow our fear of failure to drive us into obscurity! In life and faith the only way to avoid FAILURE is to say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing!
The greatest mistake that any of us can make in this journey we are all on together is to continually fear we’re going to make a mistake or fail at something that is set before us! Author H. Stanley Judd once wrote…
“Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.”
Most people I know are so afraid to fail at something that they avoid it like the plague and the end result of their fear is they stop growing, learning, and ultimately succeeding in this thing called life and faith!
The REAL TRUTH when it comes to FAILURE is this… failure and discouragements are two of the surest stepping stones on the pathway to success in all areas of our lives! Some defeats in life are only temporary detours along the journey and we must get over the negative thinking we are conditioned to have when we think of this vital tool in life’s journey! Some mistakes and failures in life are only down payments in the cheque book of life!
If we don’t take the risk to fail, then we won’t get the chance to succeed, to become the person that we desire and that God wants most for us! God doesn't want us to fail permanently at life, although He knows we will make mistakes along the way! The truth is, He desires the best for us according to His plans and purposes. In the passage from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy at the top of this blog we are reminded that God is with us through all the ups and downs of life! He is with us through the failures and successes! He is there to see us through it all! Failure or success God will never leave us or abandon us. He will be there to pick us up and dust us off and set us back on the road to becoming all He created us to be!
So the real question is simply this…
“Will you have the courage to get back up again and learn from your failures in order to become who it is God has created you to be?”
Pastor, author, and motivational speaker, Norman Vincent Peale sums it up this way…
“No matter what mistakes you have made – no matter how you’ve messed things up – you can still make a new beginning. The person who fully realizes this suffers less from the shock and pain of failure and sooner gets off to a new beginning.”
Amen to that brother…
Rev Trev
Very well put Trevor!!!!!!!!!!! It is so true, you can miss Huge God Opportunities if you are fearful to try new things and do things you may not have done before!! We do have to remember our success is about Him and what he does thru us and not about what we do ourselves!
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