Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
Failure is something none of us like to face, but we all have to. There is a saying, “If you have to fail, and you do, fail forward.” What does failing forward mean? Simply put, it means learning from what went wrong, or in Arthur Burt’s words it is, “Allowing your past failures to be the fertilizer for your future success.”
Paul E. Billheimer wrote something that puts failure in perspective. “Sometimes the only way God can work real brokenness in us is by our failure. The human spirit is so immense, so magnificent, so monumental, so rich in potential that without grace it aspires to be a god…This is why God uses for His greatest purposes only meek people, people that have been broken, emptied of themselves, delivered from their unholy ambitions to dethrone God…Because the world worships success, sometimes the only way God can break us is by failure…Strange as it may seem, apparent failure seems to be an instrument in God’s hand in preparing His people for larger service…If God is going to perfect Christ likeness in you and in me, it may sometime involve the failure of our ambition, of our plans, of our dreams, of our hopes…Failure is sometimes better than success…”
This is illustrated so well in Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s house.
The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2 “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause you to hear My words.” 3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. 4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. 5 Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the Lord. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel!” Jeremiah 18:1-6
It says, “The vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hands of the potter.” Think about it for a moment. Did the potter give up working with the clay? Did he toss it aside after one failure? Did he become jaded, bitter and hard to be around because he failed? No! It says, “He made it again, another vessel.”
We may think that the second vessel that the potter made was a lesser quality than the one he would have made if it had not been marred. As Larry Randolph said, “Only God can make plan B better than plan A.” Like the potter, we have to not give up or get all messed up when we fail. We have to give God the opportunity to make plan B better.
Potters will tell you the second vessel, made out of a failure, may be even better than the one originally attempted. The additional working of the clay makes it more pliable and yielding so the second vessel may be better than the first one. Who we are and what we do is so much better in His hands.
Here are three helpful keys for successfully failing forward by Whitney Johnson:
1. Acknowledge sadness. It’s disappointing when your dreams don’t come to fruition. Take time to grieve. If you sublimate the sadness, you risk losing your passion and getting stuck.
2. Jettison shame. Failure shouldn’t be a referendum on you. Pull shame out of the picture and label it as the waste that it is.
3. Learn the right lesson. Experts say failure is the best teacher but you have to be more specific. Ask yourself: What valuable truth did I discover by failing?
Many Blessings, BW