The Success of Failure

You would not think that being cru­ci­fied early in your career as Rabbi would get the job done, but it did. It looked like he was going about it all wrong from the very start. He col­lected poorly con­nected com­mon peo­ple to be his dis­ci­ples. Some of them had hot tem­pers and at least one of them had been involved in a despised pro­fes­sion (Matthew). It was quite a scan­dal. All sorts of mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple stood up for him. He even had deal­ings with lep­ers, hook­ers, priests, chil­dren, and Gen­tiles. What was one to think?

Jesus also had a bad habit of dis­ap­pear­ing, avoid­ing crowds, and not seek­ing any of the accepted cre­den­tials for doing his work. He ignored (and some­times bluntly chal­lenged) well-meant advice from his clos­est fol­low­ers. It is as if he was on a track that only he under­stood. Peo­ple even walked away after his best teach­ings — just shak­ing their heads. He looked like he was on some self-destructive path. He was ousted early on by the “king­mak­ers” of his time. Fail­ure appeared inevitable.

It gets replayed in Paul. He went from giv­ing his accepted cre­den­tials (his men­tors and cit­i­zen­ship) to list­ing his rejec­tions and beat­ings as his cre­den­tials. Hav­ing learned the suc­cess of fail­ure from Jesus, he went on to change the lives of many mil­lions in the gen­er­a­tions that read his few brief let­ters and stud­ied his life. In fact, he would even brag (though tongue-in-cheek) about his new­found “cre­den­tials.” He was pok­ing fun at those think­ing they were in the in crowd. In time, our social cre­den­tials have a way of lin­ing our bird­cages. What stays with us is the bless­ings of our failures.

Mother Teresa lived and worked among the most hope­less in the sin­gle most unknown and ignored part of the world — the slums of Cal­cutta. She was plagued with doubts. She started her career as an unknown and was not at all well under­stood — even by some of the peo­ple that worked the clos­est with her. She ended up inspir­ing a gen­er­a­tion of con­tem­po­rary Chris­tians and Hin­dus. All the while, it looked like what she was doing was hopeless.

God works through your cur­rent mess. Your weak­nesses are the avenues of Divine Grace. Every­thing right will come out of every­thing wrong, and you will never fig­ure out how it hap­pened. The Cre­ator that called this uni­verse into being is being just as cre­ative in your life — using the tried and true suc­cess through fail­ure meth­ods that have always worked.

Always!