Over the last month I've had lots of opportunities to have unusual conversations with people. It's like a whole theological world has opened up via e-mail, websites, in person...all of a sudden everybody is talking about life and God and church all at once. As I was going over all this in my mind on Sunday afternoon I decided that this week should be Important Lessons week on the church blog, covering some of the topics folks have been talking about all around us. We'll look at all the ways these things relate to life, faith, and church.
Dealing with failure seems like an odd place to start but it's becoming a lost art today. That's a shame because it's a critical part of success!
This train of thought started while I was talking to one of our fine youth about video games. We were sitting down to play together and all of a sudden I went Grandpa on him with a "Back in the Day" speech.
Nowadays everybody plays video games in their living room on a video game console. You buy the game and expect to play it for at least 30-40 hours over the course of its lifetime. You can save your progress along the way so when you quit and start again, you just pick up where you left off. Saving your game also helps when you make a fatal mistake and lose. Instead of starting from the beginning you just re-load from wherever you saved last. If you play long enough you're going to win the game. You may have to re-load a hundred times to do it, but it'll happen. Everybody wins eventually. This is what you expect when you buy a game. If you can't win you call the game "too hard" and get mad at the people who made it.
This was NOT the story back when I was a kid. Only the rich people had game consoles in their homes and even then they weren't very good. The real action was in the video game arcade. You dumped quarters into a machine in order to play. One quarter equals one game. If you lost you didn't re-load. You stuck another quarter in and started from the beginning, doing it over and over until you either learned how to play or ran out of money.
And believe me, the purpose of those games was to take your money. They didn't want you getting so good that you could play for an hour on one quarter. They wanted you dumping another quarter in the machine every three minutes max. So those games were HARD. They would whup you up one side and down another, especially as you progressed. There was no such thing as "winning". Every quarter ended in a loss sooner or later. You judged the experience by how much fun you had and how much you learned while losing your quarter.
These repeated failures taught us something...not just how to play a video game but how to learn, interpret, anticipate, strategize, and make value judgments about whether something was worth continuing or whether it was time to give up and try something else. (Just imagine, our parents thought these games were ruining us! Quite the opposite!)
Nowadays we live in a world of helicopter parenting, grade inflation, and money-back guarantees on everything. If you don't get an "A" something's wrong. If a product is otherwise fine but just doesn't live up to your expectations you want the store to take it back, no questions asked. Every child is a genius and every piece of their doodle artwork should be hanging in a museum. All the big lumps in life are still there--sickness, aging, death, accidents, etc.--but we don't get the daily lessons anymore. We've adopted the expectation that life will be a series of near-perfect experiences, meeting our standards and satisfaction.
This expectation has some good side effects. People support each other more than they used to. In general kids are kinder. And hey...it's nice to be able to take back those curtains because they didn't match with your carpet as well as you thought.
But this expectation also costs us. Nothing important in life is ever perfect. No marriage, no family relationship, no job, no political choice, nothing will ever live up to our standards, nor should it! Our standards aren't perfect, after all.
It's not so much that we don't understand this. Few of us find a life that's flawless. Having the way paved for us so smoothly has robbed us of the ability to deal with imperfection well. In a world where a store refusing to take back an item without a receipt is a cause for a temper tantrum and a major rant on a blog, we're becoming less capable of judging between minor infractions and major issues. The consequences in the retail sales world are small but transferred to, say, a romantic relationship that lack of judgment becomes a big deal. Folks find themselves incapable of sustaining relationships because small disagreements become huge problems. Conversely, some folks who probably should pay attention to red flags waving everywhere think maybe it's a minor deal, their own fault.
Being out of practice in dealing with (and overcoming) failure also robs us of success. I don't know anybody who succeeds wildly without risking wildly, and thus failing wildly, somewhere along the way. If you never do it wrong, how do you figure out what's right?
Recently a long-time pastor asked aloud why the church is so content with mediocrity. The answer to that is pretty simple. People don't want a church that succeeds wildly...or really does anything wildly. Somewhere along the line the definition of "good church" became "nothing goes wrong". But if nothing ever goes wrong nothing ever goes right either! We end up living in some mushy middle that everybody can sort of agree on and where nothing ever changes. It's really convenient because you can just go for an hour and be done with it, no investment required. There's no real Spirit required either.
We mentioned helicopter parenting above. How many of our clergy regularly engaging in helicopter pastoring, making sure that ministry stays contained in safe, approved programs that won't offend (or challenge) anybody? We don't get rewarded for allowing things to go daringly right. We get praised when nothing goes wrong.
Our own liturgy speaks against this kind of thing from the get-go. The first thing we do in every service is admit that we fell short and went wrong! Confession and forgiveness is integral to our expression of faith and our lives. Another way to look at the absolution God gives us every Sunday is, "I hear you and you did do wrong. But I love you, I can cover that with forgiveness, and I want you to go out and try again." Somewhere in the midst of that daily struggle things end up going right, or at least right enough for great ministry and faith to happen. If the message from God was, "Stop doing anything that fails!" our week--and our faith lives--would look quite different. We'd be called into inaction instead of action, the opposite of our mission as people of faith.
It's worth remembering that the greatest success in all of history--God's salvation and gift of eternal life shown on Easter morning--followed right on the heels of humanity's greatest failure and tragedy: the cross.
When raising our children, dealing with society, negotiating our relationships with each other, and living out our mission in the church we need to hold up the value of--and grant wide permission for--failure. Everything going right is not the barometer of faith. It's better to fail at one worthwhile endeavor than to succeed at a hundred inconsequential things. No life ends up more anemic and pale than the one in which nothing goes wrong.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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