How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

Fear of failure is toxic.  Paralysing. You can feel physically unwell though nothing is wrong. It is overwhelming, terrifying and produces catastrophic thinking.  It’s been a long time since I felt like that. Recovery from this fear of failure has had a lot to do with believing God doesn’t make mistakes. A smaller but closer set of non competitive friends, walking away from sibling rivalry and a kind husband. It has not come from no longer having failure regularly in my life.

There is something horrific about the last scene of the 1956 classic ‘Moby Dick’.  Captain Ahab, played marvellously by Gregory Peck, takes the desire to succeed too far. Obsessed with the white whale that took his leg, Captain Ahab does not know how to deal with the ‘failure’ he had the first time trying to capture the white whale. Failure a second time is not an option whatever the cost to him and his crew. Though I am unlikely to become a whaler, the end of the film unnerves me. Captain Ahab ends up tied to his obsession. I can relate to feeling thus bound.  Obsession is key in failure because it is generally my obsession that a certain outcome or win be achieved.

Much of life today is caught up in ‘Moby Dick Syndrome’. Obsession in our being right and everybody else wrong is applauded. Accepting failure is not an option as humility is of no value.  The antidote for me came in the form of learning forgiveness. To see life more as a daily pilgrimage.  Progress not perfection. Knowledge is only at best partial. Many times I have looked back at a job I did not get and thank God I never got it. That ‘failure’ was a sure blessing and led to success unforeseen.  My dad had a great saying ‘it’s only half time’.  It’s true. I learnt not to see failure as the end.  Who knows what it can crystallise into?

Society takes the ‘upward spiral downwards’.  We live driven by the need to succeed, be busy, be dictated by fashion, social media and the Media. Many years ago I worked in wool textiles and learnt something very  unsavoury about fashion magazines.  Often they use the bodies of prepubescent females and males to advertise women’s clothing.  Captain Ahab could not see the majesty of the great white whale. His fear of failure perverted his sight. He couldn’t see the craziness in chasing something so much larger and powerful than he.  It’s the same in fashion. In airbrushing. In the gas-lighting that abounds. 

The pain of failure, real or perceived, has all set me up for success.  For learning to walk away when the odds are fixed.  No longer soaking up nonsense on Facebook etc.  With the love of God in my life I can change failure into success.   Even the big failures of divorce and childlessness.  I am less vulnerable to society or others defining failure or success now.  My conscience hurts and tugs when I am going in the wrong direction.  And it is the big picture that matters:

As the Gospel states in Luke 16:19-31: You received good things, and Lazarus bad things; now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.

Be careful of the trappings of empty success as shown in this great clip from God’s Not Dead: