Pass On Your Failure
You are a failure.
When you were young, you were so idealistic. You were going to change the world. You lunged across your bedroom and vaulted off furniture, imagining the villains you were striking with your sword and blaster. You fought monsters, saved princesses, and defeated evil wizards.
Age tempered your enthusiasm but not your spirit. You were swept up into a conflict that seemed so much bigger than you, but you rose to the challenge. You defied the odds. You suffered through heartbreak as you watched not one but two mentors die. You faced the terror of losing friends and the thrill of winning them back. You were changed, shaped, molded by dark and unexpected revelations, and yet you rose from the ashes of grief and achieved something even greater than victory: redemption.
Everything you set your hand to met with success.
And in the conviction of the righteousness of your cause, you gathered young men and women, dreamers and idealists such as you had been. You set out to leave a legacy, to pass on your knowledge and wisdom and power.
And you failed.
You are, for all of us, the picture of hubris colliding with humanity. You are Icarus, if Icarus had survived his fall and washed up on a rocky shore to spend the rest of his graying and dying days in the isolation of his defeat. Isolation that is so much the mirror of your mentors. The hermit in the desert. The recluse in the swamp. The curmudgeon on the island. All the same; the failed master retreats to his hovel and hopes no one finds him.
Pride leads to failure. Failure leads to solitude. Solitude leads to self-loathing.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all stood among the ruins of our expected success only to find that the walls were a sham, papier-mâché dreams that can last only as long as they have not yet come to reality. We envision how everything will go exactly according to plan, how all the people will say, “You! You are great! There has never been anyone like you!” We pile up the rewards in our head and dream of how we will bask in the glow. And then, one piece at a time or all at once, the tower we’ve built to heaven crumbles, and we stand in the middle of it all and know the truth.
We’re all failures.
But that doesn’t have to be your legacy.
You have another chance. Another chance to pass on what you have learned. Most importantly, to pass on the lessons of your failure. That you are human. That you cannot lean so much on your own ability, your own understanding. That success comes with reliance on that which is greater.
This is the picture you must be for us. A picture of humility and trust. Because we all want to imagine ourselves as the man you were when you were younger, charging into battle with sword and blaster, defeating monsters and villains and saving the day. But the truth of who we are is that we don’t just fail after such victories. We fail before them. During them. Through them.
We have to learn to accept that failure is our lot. We have to learn to trust in the One who never fails. We need to grow beyond you and into Someone greater.
So pass on your failure. And teach us to do the same.
Brandon Steenbock
Brandon serves as Young Adult Minister at St. Mark Lutheran Church, De Pere/Green Bay, WI. He's married to Nikki, and together they have two sons. Passions include talking about Jesus, literature, and coffee.
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