The Gift of Failure
By Monica
Original post by Becoming Fully Alive blogsite
Six years.
“You’ve worked so hard.”
“You deserve it, God will bless you.”
“Do your best and God will do the rest.”
I have been here, untangling the knots. Untangling the idea that God’s love means He will carry you to every success. Shaking off every ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’
I write to you today in the knowledge that, God loved me so much that He let me fail. The struggle from bitter to better, from self-deprecation to self-compassion, that is leading me through a journey of acceptance, so that the image, or who I ought to be, can greet who I really am.
To acquire the mind of Christ means to learn to see myself as He sees me. Sometimes, we think that if we beat our chests hard enough, if we beat ourselves hard enough, it will make us humble. But the truth is the opposite. The truth is, real humility is recognising who we really are. It is the courage to hear a greater Voice call us His beloved, His successful sons and daughters.
Failure has been a gift; a very revealing gift. Acquiring the mind of Christ means recognising in the mirror the person who met their suffering with bitterness and despair. I had read many spiritual books about suffering, that I expected to wake up joyful the next morning. But this is no synaxarium story.
I found that, I was not all who I thought I was, “Then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind” Ephesians 41:4, and that I was literally tossed by this wind.
So, failure has been a door, a door of repentance, so that He can recreate me from the ashes of this fire.
“we must lay before Him what is in us, not what we ought to be in us”- C.S Lewis
Failure helps us shake off the veil of perfection, that we may stand honestly before Him. Failure allows us to grow in compassion for ourselves and for others who are struggling; because we remember how hard things have been for us.
“Joseph was with God and he was successful” has never rang so true, because often we focus on the gift not the gift-Giver. In the story of the wedding of Canaan we rejoice at the new wine, but we completely miss that in providing the wine, Christ was declaring Himself the Bridegroom, fulfilling the messianic prophesies in Hosea, Songs of Solomon and Isaiah.
If I have the courage to see myself, I will learn to recognise Him in me. If I have the courage to relentlessly stay with Him, to not run from Him, that makes me successful.
Original blog found at – http://becomingfullyalive.com/the-gift-of-failure/