Go Out and Fail Today

I’ve been thinking about how to fail the right way.

There is this half-hearted way that we tend to strive toward our objectives, whenever we set out to accomplish them by our own plans and power. We go forward, but we also brace for failure. In these goals we imagine, we are like little gods who conceive of new worlds for ourselves to inhabit. Yet we know we are too small, as gods, to be able to certainly make those worlds real.

As Psalm 127 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.”

A person senses this even if he doesn’t have faith, even if she doesn’t have the Bible. We sense how vain our labor is. The innate tentativeness of nearly all our efforts is based upon this. We fear to break our own hearts by pinning too much hope upon those efforts, and upon our own plans.

But then there is the effort that is founded on the idea that fruitfulness comes from Christ—that success comes from the Son. We are joined in the work. Therefore, we submit to being joined in the imagining as well. As Jesus laid down his life for each of us, we are ready to lay down the “life” of whatever plans we have laid.

I have been reading this book, The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson. The book’s message is that we strive with God, and persevere by God, to realize the dream that is written upon our own God-inspired heart.

I have been reading another book, What Now? by Ann Patchett. The point of this book is that the way ahead in any life is only clear in retrospect. Life’s journey doesn’t follow a map, and it tends to turn on decisions that didn’t seem significant at the time they were being made.

The books offer two different ideas. They offer two different compelling ideas—ideas that, taken alone, both seem right. I, and no doubt you as well, have encountered variations on each of these ideas before. Both books make their points well—I recommend them. Yet I have been looking to reconcile their disparate themes. Namely, to reconcile the idea that the success we dream is to be attained, versus the apparently competing idea that the success we did not dream is out there to be found.

Paul wrote this to the Corinthian church:

Do I plan according to the flesh, that with me there should be Yes, Yes, and No, No?

All the promises of God in him are Yes, and in him Amen, to the glory of God through us. —2 Corinthians 1:17 and 20 (emphasis mine)

In other words, the game is God’s to win.

But even more than that, the game is God’s to determine just what the game is.

God is glorified through us, said Paul. That means the manifold dreams of our own yearning hearts absolutely are important. Racing ahead to win the success that God placed upon our hearts is a vital component of how we trust in him, and how we bear fruit for him. It is a vital part of how we love him.

Yet at the same time, achieving precisely the success we imagined could be the very worst thing for us. He has such great use for us that he calls us to something even better.

In this world, the only success we can imagine for ourselves is the success defined and limited by this world’s rules and understanding. We are part of this world. Yet we are not of it. We think and work within this world, while our lives and the fullest part of our destinies belong to the eternal. Thus, the true success that we realize, in a moment of work or a lifetime, might intersect with the success we imagined—or it might not. Either way, we laugh.

We laugh in the way that I imagine Paul learned to laugh at his own “Yes, Yes” and “No, No.”

We laugh, and we stand with God wherever he puts us. Wherever! That spot might be in the place of the realization and fruition of all of our plans and strivings. Or, perhaps just as likely, God might put us where we get to see the colorful and instructive disruption of the many simple plans we originally drew.

There is this conversation we are having with God, and the title of that conversation is “Life on Earth.” Our daring to pursue plans or dream big dreams is the way that we speak to God within the reality he created around us. And when we do this, God speaks back.

Is God a Bully?

“The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him,” says Psalm 147:11. We are to fear the Lord. And I do.

Still, somehow, this doesn’t seem right. Why would a good and loving God want us to fear him? Is he some kind of bully?

Intellectually, I have an answer. Fear is a form of worship. We make ourselves tiny before the things we fear, lowering and limiting ourselves until we are smaller than whatever the small thing is that rules us. The reason to turn our fear toward God is precisely because he is not a bully. If we acknowledge that we are humble and small before the infinite God, then that still leaves plenty of room for us to be great—to be fully the ones he created us to be.

But recently I discovered something more—another answer to the question of why to fear, a response that went beyond the intellectual. I discovered, in my heart, a full and genuine feeling of fear toward God. I find I don’t just have an argument anymore, I have an emotion.

Why?

I sat with this feeling and studied it. I sat with God over this fear toward God. And I found: This particular fear is not a fear like anxiety, not a fear like dread, and certainly not a fear like panic.

It is fear instead that flows from awe. The fear is a consequence, maybe an inescapable consequence, of being filled with the Spirit of God. The Spirit pushes closer to the skin as my resistance is slowly overcome, and I find that I am fed much less by my own attainment and effort. I find that much more of who I understand myself to be is built upon the loving enormity of that which is infinite, eternal, ultimate, and deeply personal all at once.

I have acknowledged Jesus for about three years. I have seen redemption over that time—an elegant reengineering of my heart and life in ways I never could have planned or chosen. I have also seen the reality of prayer—God faithfully showing answers to those things I trustingly bring before him, providing a tangible response to prayer far more often than he is silent.

God accompanies us. I need him. I always did need him, but now I know it.

And even now—particularly now—I feel fearful as I come before him. There is still a part of me that fears not honoring him or praying to him in a fitting way. I do fear God—I fear him indeed. I fear how lost and small I would be if he ever turned away.

The Tale of the Fountain and the Vessels

Once upon a time:

There was this fountain. It was a fountain that poured out abundant love. The fountain imagined vessels into existence to hold all of the love that was pouring out of it.

Every vessel the fountain imagined was different. Some were ceramic and some were crystal. Every bowl, cup, and decanter was made in the image of some particular shape of love that had shimmered within the fountain’s dancing patterns. And every ewer, flagon, and flask filled up with the love, sloshing with all that it contained. Each of the vessels glistened in the overflow, all of them radiating from the love cascading into and around them.

Then all of the vessels smashed themselves to pieces.

Why they did this—even just after it happened—was not clear. It was apparent at once that the act had been wantonly foolish and destructive. It was simply that smashing themselves had been the one choice forbidden to them by the fountain. Smashing themselves therefore became the one choice that was fascinating.

The fountain remained unchanged, but all of the vessels lay shattered. All the love that had been in them spilled away.

The vessels reformed themselves, sort of. Pieces were missing. The pieces that did still remain fit poorly together in the wake of the violence. For the sake of being whole at all, a vessel would graft its remaining pieces into a clumsy, awkward, mismatched assembly that at least managed to hold some small, meager, misshapen amount of space.

Most of the vessels did this. They now were porous and small, unable to hold much love at all. What love they did hold seeped out. These vessels would have been discarded—except that the fountain said no.

The fountain made a new vessel instead. The new vessel came out of the very heart of the fountain.

Look at this, said the fountain to the vessels. You can be like this.

Some began to try, rearranging their shards to be more like the perfect vessel. But even as they had just begun to do this, the new vessel itself was lost. The perfect vessel was smashed. The new vessel was the one discarded, while the ones that should have been discarded remained.

But something was happening. Even more of the broken ones bravely began to let go of their meager and malformed shapes. Even more of the damaged vessels strove to match the proportions of the perfect vessel about which they had heard.

All of them were still missing pieces. All of them were missing huge shards. Previously, they had patched and covered themselves to make due, to make themselves somehow whole. Now, as they stretched instead toward their fuller shapes, the gaps became fully evident. The vessels tried to hold love, and the love spilled out through the wide and open holes.

Yet the fountain still was abundant. It was as abundant as it ever had been, as abundant as it was from the beginning. Love poured out of the fountain so fast that it filled the vessels and kept them full, the overflow replacing all of the love in all of the vessels as quickly as it flowed out of even the widest holes in their sides. The fountain did this for every vessel that simply believed the fountain’s promise that a broken vessel could again be whole.

Something else happened, too. The love that spilled out of all of these large open holes was shaped by the jagged gaps. The shimmering patterns created by these shard-shaped openings intersected in intricate ways. As the vessels spread wide to reclaim the original dimensions that the fountain had given them, the fullness of each vessel’s damage was revealed. Love streamed out of the holes in crazy gushes, and the wounds became beautiful.

The Next Great Move Toward Him

Why do we not congratulate people who have suffered affliction or loss?

Why do we not praise God for the hand that takes instead of giving?

To do so, of course, would seem insensitive to say the least. It would even seem heartless. Affliction is painful. Loss hurts. When a brother or sister is frightened or agonizing, the sympathetic heart can do little except to look into those worrying eyes and say, “This isn’t right. God doesn’t want this for you. He wants to show you that he loves you by making this situation go away.”

Indeed, we want that sentiment to be true for our personal sakes as well. A little of our own fear enters into someone else’s sadness, because we know how readily our own circumstances might change. Tomorrow, it might be you or me who is weeping for relief from the affliction.

Yet this expectation that only pleasantness flows into our life out of God’s hand is, at best, questionable. The belief that the sources of pain in our lives are all errors that cry out for correction seems inconsistent with what we, the students and followers of Jesus, claim to believe.

God is a creator. He alone knows what each of us can become. He is the creator, along with each of us, of our own particular lives. God is the challenging and uplifting creator who calls each of us to a personal destiny that is profoundly greater than what we would otherwise accept for ourselves.

Jesus does make it clear: You will have trouble within this finite world (John 16:33).

He makes it clear: You will be pruned so that you can be more fruitful (John 15:2).

He makes it clear: He disciplines the ones he loves (Revelation 3:19).

For the sake of being left to have an unruffled life, would you rather be unfruitful? Would you rather not be loved by God?

Jesus also makes it clear that his way is the way of joy. But joy is eternal. Therefore, it cannot be that joy is linked to our material comfort, because everything about this current material world is going away. Indeed, the most basic choice each of us is called to make—the fundamental question of faith—is whether or not we too will go the way of the world. Joy is found on the other side of this choice. The choice keeps on presenting itself. We find joy, in every case, by embracing the eternal instead of the fleeting.

The believer is exhorted to give thanks in all things (1 Thessalonians 5:18). We do this not because of the “things,” not because “all things” are fun, but instead because of us—because we are being remade. We’re being recreated, in mind and in body. Through the teaching and events that transform us, we are becoming more like his Son, the one who sees clearly how much of the world we know is simply melting from existence.

The personal transformation is often gradual. In small increments, we find we are a little freer and a little more loving year by year. But then there are the times when the next step is decisive and large, the times when God moves his hand visibly and says: You are ready now. Leave your comfort even farther behind you, as you make your great move toward me.