Failure scares us. It holds us back. It keeps us small. We fear it, avoid it, and dodge it by any means necessary. And when we can’t avoid it, we internalize it. Failure is as potent as poison, and it burns like fire. It’s very difficult to look it in the eyes without letting it do something to us — whether that’s to strip us of confidence or sabotage our future. We let it have too much power, leaving us breathless and quaking like a cat that fell into a frozen pond. We let the fear of failure abort our future success, like larvae that would rather wither away still in cacoons than emerge as butterflies and clumsily learn to fly.
This view of failure is interwoven with so many lies and falsehoods that it sometimes requires us to come undone entirely before we realize it was just a little helpless man behind a curtain rather than the Great and Powerful Oz we had built up in our minds. As Christians, though, we sometimes find ourselves walking the thin tightrope between failure and success because we fear both. In the Christian world, we sometimes associate success with greed, materialism, selfishness, narcissism, or any number of other “unholy” characteristics. And yet, we don’t find failure particularly palatable either. So we stay in our lane, we stay small, and we associate “faithfulness” and “obedience” with the mundane and the mediocre. But what if the secret to bringing Heaven down to Earth (like Jesus taught us to pray for) is actually found by living lives of faith where we have nothing to lose and only eternity to gain? People whose identities are planted firmly in Christ are immune to both the defeat of failure and the narcissism of success because they’ve already inherited the riches of Heaven and released all the titles of Earth.
So, as we unlearn our fear of failure together, it might help to hear the three things no one told you about failure:
Failure is inevitable
It always strikes me as ironic that humans have such a fear of something so inevitable. It’s not entirely unexpected because we tend to fear pain, too, which is just as likely. However, we have this human response to tense up in dreaded anticipation of the thing we fear, which often makes the pain worse. When we tense our arms and hyperventilate before a nurse pricks us with a needle, it often makes the whole ordeal more dramatic than it would have otherwise been. Similarly, we make such an ado of our own failure that it causes far more self-deprecation and internal defeat than it innately carries.
The freeing truth about failure is that it will inevitably come. Some may read that sentence as a threat, but it is meant to be far less foreboding. In fact, the inevitability of failure has the potential to lessen its sting. Failure is part of the human experience. It is not a statement about your worth, capableness, or character. Instead, it is simply part of being human. Everyone fails sometimes; whether you’re a king or a peasant, a pop star or a tech guru – we all fail. Let that sink in and permeate your psyche for a moment. You are human, therefore you fail. Let that free you to let yourself fail…like every other human.
Failure is a moving target
We are creatures that change and grow over time. Failure is a part of that growth. Babies need to wobble and fall down to strengthen the leg muscles they need to stand and walk. 4th graders and college kids alike must make mistakes on challenging new lessons and exams to grow their knowledge. Standup comics must bomb a few sets to learn which jokes make their audience laugh. Failure is a sign that we are challenging ourselves. This means that each time we succeed, we open a dozen new opportunities to fail. Every time we “level up,” we enter a new arena with new ways to fail and grow.
Failure is a moving target. The only way to avoid failure entirely is never to be challenged and never try new things. However, the most successful people in life are the people who are resilient enough to be bad at something until they are good at it. The fear of failure doesn’t keep them from trying because they know that the very act of trying is a necessary part of learning and succeeding. Don’t be afraid to try, and don’t be embarrassed to let people see you try and fail and try again. Mastery of a skill or a subject only comes when we apply ourselves to the vulnerable and humbling process of being bad at something enough times to be good at it.
Failure is the road to success
Failure is not the opposite of success — it is the means by which we achieve success. Failure and faithfulness are the threads by which the fabric of success is woven. This is why some of the most successful people on Earth consider failure a victory. Authors keep rejection letters like trophies. Billionaires tell stories of their first failed business ventures. Hollywood stars recount all of the auditions from which they never got a callback. C.S. Lewis says, “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
As Christians, our priorities and measures of success may differ from those of the world. Francis Chan says, “Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” Because we have an eternal perspective, there are some temporal things in this life that we may not hold in such high esteem because we have experienced things much more valuable than the joys of nice cars or name-brand fashion.
Belligerent Faith in the Midst of Failure
Because we know Christ, we also have an entirely different gauge for what is possible. We don’t draw our power, inspiration, or capabilities solely from our own reservoirs of self-sufficiency. Instead, we know the words of Luke 1:37 to be true: “Nothing is impossible with God.” No failure, darkness, evil, death, or defeat can separate us from the love of God OR keep the power of God from achieving victory. So, no matter what big goals God has laid on your heart or the big callings He has asked of you, there is no need to fear. You have the spirit of the Living God within you. Therefore, you can live a life of belligerent faith and resilient confidence to run this race with endurance and reject every hell-sent lie that failure is a reason to give up, give in, or give out.
