Offering Our Failure to the Lord

In part one of this series I reflected on some of the ways we typically respond to failure and noted that the gospel is not that we never fail, but that God meets us in and through our failures. In part 2 of this series, I looked at failure as an opportunity for us to find our true identity in God and failure as an opportunity for God to free us from the shame that plagues us. In this final reflection, I will explore the invitation to abandon ourselves to the Lord as a response to failure.

When failure comes crashing down upon us, when our efforts seem to come to nothing, we are invited to abandon ourselves completely to the Lord. In times of failure, we experience our weakness and our need for God. We were not created to be heroic individuals. We were not created to be heroic communities. We were created to be humble people who give ourselves completely to God. 

Unfortunately, when we are experiencing failure, we typically don’t feel like giving ourselves to God. We believe that we should be giving ourselves to God in success. When we have failed we don’t believe that God would want us in our state of failure. Why would God want damaged goods like us? Who are we in failure that God would desire us? We would prefer to make a glorious offering of ourselves. And yet God loves us and welcomes us even in our failure. We are invited to give ourselves completely to God.

Many of us are aware that we don’t give ourselves completely to God, we may desire to, we may try to, but we know that there are significant parts of ourselves that are not given over to God. We don’t see that most of what we hold back from God are the parts of ourselves we are not proud of, the parts we try to suppress or eliminate from our lives. We don’t give our failure to God. We don’t give our fear, our doubt, our anger, our resentment to the Lord. 

What would happen if we gave these parts of ourselves completely to God? For one thing, we would be a lot more given over to God. Secondly, God would rejoice and delight to have these beloved parts of ourselves brought back and offered to him. We often underestimate how much God loves us, that God loves all of us, and that God particularly loves these parts of ourselves we have held back. 

Giving our failure to God also allows God to be at work in those areas we have so long withheld from him. God wants to redeem all parts of us, bring each part individually and together as a whole person, into the healing light of his love and grace. What freedom we receive when we offer ourselves more completely to him, allowing his love and grace to allow us to accept our own humanity, our true identity as beloved children of God. 

And so I leave you with this question… In what way is the Lord inviting you to offer your failure to him?

© Dale Gish 2019. All Rights Reserved.

Failure as Spiritual Opportunity

This is the second in a series of posts on failure.

In my first post, The False Path of Failure, I reflected on some of the ways that fear of failure becomes an obstacle in our spiritual lives. I suggested that the good news is that though we are failures, God loves us and meets us in our failure. But let’s be honest, we have a hard time hearing that good news. Instead, when we face failure, we are devastated, discouraged, we feel hopeless. We wanted so much to feel like we are successful, but now we have failed.

Failure and identity

It’s hard to personally come to terms with our failure. We’ve fashioned a false identity of success for ourselves and now that false identity comes crashing down which has shielded us from the truth of reality. And we are terrified of the truth. What if we are a failure? What if we are worthless? How will we live with ourselves?

We may find ourselves taking on a new identity, a failure identity, one of discouragement and self flagellation, but that also is a false identity. And we may cycle from our success identity to our failure identity and then back again, never knowing our true identity.

There is a truth about our identity for us to discover. We are neither awesome successes or terrible failures. We are human beings, flawed and sinful creatures, but also beloved, gifted, children of God. That is the truth of reality; that is our true identity. God loves us and sees us just as we are, the good and the bad, the gifts and the flaws, the holy and the sinful. God always sees us as we truly are, in all our complexity, while we keep constructing false images or identities.

But when we fail, the Lord sees it as an opportunity to strip away some of our false identity and show us a glimpse of who we really are. God takes failure and turns it into an opportunity for good. In failure, we recognize our need for God. We turn to Jesus. We confess our frailty, or brokenness and our sin. When Jesus meets us he looks us straight in the eyes and pronounces us beloved. In the midst of our failure, we are invited to see ourselves through his eyes, to experience his love, his care, the truth about who we are.

What a gift! When we see ourselves truthfully, we can relax. We don’t have to strive. We can rest in being known and loved and accompanied by the living God, “for in him we live and move and have our being” -Acts 17:28

Failure and Shame

Failure is not only a personal thing, but it’s also a social thing. When we experience failure, we typically feel shame. When we fail, we want to hide from others because we don’t want them to see us as failures. Shame may be the thing we dread most about failure. Wherever failure goes, shame follows close behind

Jesus is not deterred by our shame; Jesus sees it as an opportunity. Jesus has borne the cross on our behalf, taking it’s shame upon himself, taking our same upon himself. We may want to hide in shame from him, but once again, Jesus looks us straight in the eyes and is not ashamed of us. He calls us friend. He lifts us up from the dust and restores our souls. He invites himself to our house like Zaccheaus. He touches us when we feel unclean. He smiles and welcomes us into his kingdom, where the last shall be first, where the meek shall inherit the earth, where the Lord is close to the lowly.

When we open ourselves to Jesus in the midst of our failure, Jesus takes our shame away. To be freed from shame is such joy. We may discover that through our failure we are now closer to Jesus.

Sometimes we are freed from shame and it never returns, but many times we experience it coming back upon us in the days to come. But having experienced Jesus embrace us in our failure, we now see that the shame is not from the Lord. It is a temptation, a snare of the evil one, who wants us buried in shame and back in our false identities. We begin to notice shame as it begins to work on us and we have the opportunity once again to open ourselves to Jesus, to let him meet us in the midst of failure.

If you struggle to open yourself to the Lord in the midst of failure, consider meeting with a spiritual director. In spiritual direction you can explore failure in a deeper way and find ways to let failure draw you close to Jesus.

Stay tuned for part three of this series on failure coming soon, as I explore the theme of abandoning ourselves to the Lord as a response to failure.

© Dale Gish 2019. All Rights Reserved.

The False Path of Failure

As a spiritual director, I have been reflecting a lot about failure recently. I see the ways our perspectives on failure interfere with our relationship with God, and I’m discovering a different way to approach failure, one that leads us to God. Here is part 1 of a series of blog posts on failure and the spiritual life.

Failure surrounds us. Pressure to perform. Pressure to succeed. American culture teaches us that we are supposed to be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Disney movies tell us that we can fulfill all of our dreams. More than ever, we start building our resumes in childhood, anything to get into the right school, the right career, all to have a successful life.

All the while, in the shadows something is lurking, the specter of failure. What if I don’t succeed? What if I don’t fulfill my dreams? What if I don’t get into that school? What if I fail? What if other people see me fail or see me as a failure? Failure is terrifying. We will do anything to avoid it. And so we push it away, distract ourselves, seek social media affirmation, tell ourselves lies.

But still, this nagging fear gnaws at us. What if I am a failure?

Surely our faith can help us with this… but unfortunately, our faith is infected with the same sickness. We become good Christian people and suddenly our standards for success are even higher. As a Christian, I’m supposed to have my daily quiet time and love it. I’m supposed to be full of the fruit of the Spirit. I’m supposed to have a wonderful marriage and perfect kids. I’m supposed to be loving and generous and forgiving. I’m supposed to be someone that people will look at and say, “look how successful and wonderful that Christian is, I want that. Tell me how I can become a Christian too, to be a success like you.” We even start thinking that eternal salvation, rides and falls on our success.

And our churches become places where have to work hard not to show our flaws, always presenting our best selves. And then in our spiritual lives, we feel ashamed of our sins and failings and hide them from God, like Adam and Eve in the garden. We only go to God when we feel righteous. We begin hiding more and more of ourselves from God.

And God becomes our success evaluator, our judge, a harsh taskmaster, always requiring more, always seeing the ways we fall short, always frustrated with our failure. It’s no wonder we don’t want to pray, we find ourselves avoiding intimacy with God.

That’s all completely the opposite of the gospel. The gospel is that we are failures and God loves us, meets us in our failure and offers us new life through our failures. Such good news! Our failure doesn’t separate us from God. Instead, our failure is an opportunity to grow close to God.

Read more about failure in my followup post entitled Failure as Spiritual Opportunity

© Dale Gish 2019. All Rights Reserved.