On Failure

Nobody likes to fail and everyone does it

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

A remarkable thing about failure is we never stop failing in life. You may master one skill or overcome one besetting sin, but you’ll just find something else to fail at. You learn to speak French fluently but you forget your wife’s birthday. You exercise three times a week but you don’t read your bible or pray. You study well for an exam but fail to be kind to a grieving friend. We always fail. And yet we don’t get used to the feeling. That punch in the gut when you realize that you’ve let someone down or made a fool of yourself or not reached a standard of perfection set by you or some authority figure in your life. An ache of awareness of your inadequacy and an anxious desire to Make Things Right when you know you can’t. You can’t go back and fix it. And so you mull the mistake over in your mind trying to find the exact moment where things went wrong so that at least you can fix it in your head.

Only, nothing is ever resolved and you’ve still failed and you will fail again.

“You’re only human,” you tell yourself. Ah, yes, your mind replies, but you could have chosen not to fail. You could have remembered her birthday, or read your bible, or stayed with the grieving friend. You still had a choice! And there’s the rub. It’s true “you’re only human” but it’s also true that you had the free will to choose not to fail. You could have taken steps to prevent this error. So you aren’t entirely off the hook, either.

Of course, what really gets us are the failures that cut at what we fear most about ourselves, the person were most afraid of becoming: negligent, lazy, irresponsible, violent, ignorant, bad, sinful, or whatever your core fear may be. Those failures hit us like a freight train, making us question not only our competence, but our identity. So that we wonder not just, “am I good at juggling?” but “am I a klutz?” And once you go down the path of basing your identity on your failures, you quickly end up in a dark place, surrounded by a mountain of “evidence” that you are what you fear to be (because we all have plenty of failures in life to pull from to make up any narrative imaginable). Remember that time you tripped on the stairs? Remember that time you fell off your bike? Remember that time you slipped on the ice? (All three perfectly normal experiences, by the way, but your mind tells you that these are unique clues that you are clumsy). And by then, your mind is off to the races, compounding your failures and building a story about who you are.

Maybe it’s one big failure. One thing you did or happened to you that gnaws at you, replaying in your mind, reminding you of your worthlessness or sinfulness or flaws. Why did you make that decision? What did you commit that sin? Why did you allow that to happen to you? Now you have to live with your failure for the rest of your life and it sits with you like a great boulder on your chest pressing the air out of your lungs.

Or maybe it’s the same repeated failure. A besetting sin. An addiction that you keep turning to in desperation and loneliness only to be filled with shame and regret and guilt when it’s done. Failure again. With Paul you cry, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15)! Maybe this has even gone on for years and you feel beyond help. A condemned failure.

The question is: how do we respond to failure?

One place we can look is 2 Corinthians 7:10: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”

There is a way of looking at your failures, particularly sins, that produces repentance and leads to salvation without regret (!), and there is a way of looking at your failures that pulls you in on yourself and only produces death.

The key here is Christ. In Christ our failures are atoned for and we have the freedom to courageously live for him. Yes, our failures still have consequences, and we should strive for excellence in our lives, but as I said at the beginning, we will never stop failing in this life, in one way or another.

Note that Paul first acknowledges the reality of “godly grief.” It’s okay and even proper and good to grieve over your failures, to acknowledge the moral weightiness of them and their consequences in the world. But that grief has an end in Christ. I mean that in two ways. In Christ our grieving literally comes to an end because he has paid for our sins, and the end (telos) of our grieving is remembering what Christ has done for us.

Next Paul says it “produces repentance,” which tells us that this is a grief that leads to action. It’s a grief that looks inward, examines the failure, identifies the sin, turns away from that sin, and turns toward Christ. Even when the failure is not a sin issue, this basic formula is helpful: inward reflection, identify the mistake, make note of what you’ll do better in the future, and move on. This is a basic skill for a mature life.

Paul seems to accept that this repentance is going to be a basic part of the life of the believer because he says it “leads to salvation.” In other words, the path to salvation does not go through being perfect and never failing. The path to salvation goes through failing and repenting. Over and over again. For all of us. And that’s okay. It’s beautiful because it’s part of God’s plan.

My favorite part of this verse is the phrase “without regret,” because to me this is the whole key to understanding how to avoid worldly grief. Godly grief has a trademark: it doesn’t come with regret. There’s no obsessing over the failure or going over the details again and again to try and fix things in your mind. Godly grief accepts that Christ has forgiven us and that is more than enough. And so we are free to live. Of course this takes courage, because your mind will tell you that you are going to become that terrible person you fear, but we must endure this fear based on our faith in Christ and hope in redemption.

Understood this way, “worldly grief” is a morbid curiosity about your own failures and sins. It is an inward focus that never turns upward toward God for repentance or straight ahead back to life in front of you. Worldly grief can possess you, cutting you off from the people you love and who love you, enveloping you in a cloud of doubt, insecurity, and shame. Causing you to focus more and more on the failure and on the feared possible self you might become. Eventually you stop moving, stop acting, stop trying, out of fear that you will fail again. The end of worldly grief is indeed death. A ceasing of all activity. A freezing up. Lethargy. Inhibition. Inaction.

Yes, we are going to keep failing at life, again and again. Failing people we love. Failing at things we love. Failing the God we love. But we have a path for dealing with failure. It takes faith, courage, and hope. Faith in Christ’s finished work on the cross. Courage to endure the doubts our mind and Satan will throw at us, begging us to reconsider our failure. Hope that God is sanctifying us, not letting us turn into the failure we fear we will become. Our duty is to exercise these virtues, to practice godly grief, to repent, and to bask in the joy of our salvation.