Day 4089 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 3:23 NIV

What is failure?

Is it some forlorn finish line we manage to find too much of the time despite trying to find its better? Is it the wind that blows us off our feet and sweeps our minds clear of any idea as to how to get back upon them as life’s weather rolls ever in? Is it the discounting of expectations accepted without our realizing we’re doing so until it’s been done and there’s nothing we can do to undo it? Is it the undoing of us and all we’ve tried to do, to be, to see inside this life as lived inside this place in which we all fail inside every day? Is it the sum of the days in which things didn’t go our way despite our always trying to ensure they might?

Is it a lack of might seen inside a sudden loss of courage found in an ongoing tendency toward being afraid of falling short?

Is it the wisdom won within falling short as can only be done, can only be understood should there stand some exemplar example against which we’re either called to compare or compete, or elsewise simply chosen to attempt?

Oddly enough the truth of failure is that it comes along the way of what are in fact efforts gave. For one has to try something, to do something if they’re to fail thereat. You can’t fail what you don’t try, though it could be argued, and should be I think, that not trying is the grandest failure of all as it’s a personal choice to simply not care at all, or at least not enough to try.

And yet, such is life, is it not?

I mean, how many things have we not tried because we either didn’t care as to whatever they may or might not have profited us in the doing thereof or simply because we were afraid that we’d fail, fall short, fall apart? Personally I can’t possibly remember all the things I’ve not tried because, well, I didn’t try them. Could be that I didn’t find them important, didn’t think them worth then my effort, attention, intention, or, again, was just afraid of what I assumed the outcome would be.

This is why we don’t ask so many questions of either ourselves or others. We think we know the answers. Indeed, same scene is seen inside pretty much everything else we do or don’t in life. Folks don’t exercise because they know it’ll probably be hard, and too that said difficulty will probably prove embarrassing as it’s a clear sign showing our weakness. People don’t learn how to cook their own meals because they’re afraid they’ll mess it up, that it’ll taste horrible, waste money, get thrown in the trash, make them sick maybe, and so they just leave it to the pros who are teenagers reheating frozen dinners and wrapping them in branded papers.

These days people don’t do all sorts of things, failing then to know anything about them. Granted, same could be said of when we too were kids as all of us did try certain things and refused to try others.

But still, it sure feels as if failure has somehow managed to become something of an almost welcome companion.

All because I think we’ve all become so scared to try at much of anything in life because we know that odds are we’re going to fail, to fall short, to fall apart should we even dare attempt to even barely start down what would all but instantly prove a collapse into utter insanity all but demanded as we’d be found there doing things we didn’t know how to.

But is failure found only in those things we don’t know how to do, those things then that we can’t immediately do as well as our ego asks we do everything?

Or is maybe failure an ego thing?

For is it not something of a pride seeking to protect itself sort of like a damaged aircraft seeking the safest place to crash? Indeed, let’s say we’ve tried to fly, got our courage up to try at taking off, got a bit of lift and then our engine burned out. Here we are just high enough off the ground thanks to curiosity having won for a moment and convinced us to try our hand at that audacity to imagine we could fly. But then all of the sudden what we need to stay aloft has gone soft and left us realizing that the coming back down won’t be as comfy as we thought.

Did we fail?

Or say you find this girl at school to be really pretty and quite easy to talk to. And so after a few weeks of getting your courage up, and rehearsing all the lines you’ll always oddly enough not think to say at the time, you finally find yourself face-to-face asking her on a date. But she says no.

Did you fail?

Or maybe you do get tired of always being tired and buy into this idea that some folks sell that tells all about how much better you’ll feel if you’d just get up and get moving, a strange blending of spending energy in the expectation of that somehow helping to start making more of the same that you’ve spent to get it. So you hit the gym and literally do nothing but sit there and look around at all the stuff you don’t know how to use and all the people doing things you have no idea how to do. Then you eventually just leave because the fear of looking foolish creeps back in.

Is that a failure?

Or you catch yourself saying a word you’ve said all your life but this time it just didn’t feel right. So you say it again and, nope, still something off. Then you sit and study why that might be that all of the sudden this word seems to feel wrong, dirty, unbecoming of what you may not realize you’ve become and wish suddenly not to be anymore. So you dust off the Bible and start reading about this strange sense that says that something’s off as is seen, felt, heard inside the things we do and say and sometimes think. And then you start to realize that you’ve been telling yourself all these lies about how words don’t mean much and maybe your actions don’t either.

But then you lose the fire to learn why you don’t feel right and just slide back to doing your best to not care as that’s always proven far easier.

Was this a failure?

Well, guess that depends on what we personally measure failure to be. Because, in honesty, failure is something of an entirely personal venture. Nobody else can fail for us. Now they can point out our flaws, falls, foolishness and fear. But we’re the ones who have to make the decisions as to whether or not we try something, how long we might, when we’ll quit and then if we’ll ever attempt it again.

Thankfully we’re not left alone to determine the example against which we do or don’t measure ourselves.

But yet so often we do set out to do so much by ourselves that we do lose sight of that life beyond that line that we’d not drawn.

Because we think that the best way to succeed is to always do only what we know we can, which is usually only whatever we already have. For after all, if we’ve not done something before and thus know little beyond a tertiary and transitory posing or positioning thereof, then yeah, odds are we’ll mess it up as we just don’t know really what doing it right even looks like.

Can we say that of life?

That we don’t know what a right life looks like, sounds like, feels like? That we have no baser measure as to whether we’re doing what we should be? That we don’t have an understanding as to the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, righteousness and wickedness?

We seriously still going with this?

That we didn’t know better inside every moment thus far in which it’s been proven that better was what we entirely failed to be?

Come on friends, surely even we don’t really believe that!

Again, it’s a lie we tell ourselves seeking to protect ourselves in life from life and all the hardship and heaviness herein. For yes, this life is a monster sometimes. It’s truly a burden we’re asked to be the beasts which bear. It doesn’t rain when we need it to then pours when we’d wish it wouldn’t as we’d made plans that need quote unquote “better weather”. It brings us trials and torments and even more temptations which oddly enough never manage to seem all that trying or tormenting as they’re rather for those things that we don’t yet see or hear as the failures they are.

But just because we fail to see something as a failure doesn’t mean we’re just going to skate on the consequences for having failed to do so.

Because, again, no, we’re not alone in this. Sure, we’re the ones who makes the decisions. But reality is that God’s the One which challenges us with them. He’s the One who sends the fire in order to harden us. He’s the One who sends the rain to wash away those things which keep us soft. He’s the One who literally calls us lob off hands should they ask us to continue failing Him by reaching still for sin.

Yes, He’s the One who seeks to help us find those points and places in which we’ll fail, fall short, fall apart.

Why?

Because He knows we won’t. But too that if we don’t then those weaknesses and worries will just continue to exist in the background waiting for their opportune time to spring forth and trip us up. Take temptations for example. They’re those lusts and desires that have been in us, around us for so long now that we’ve basically grown used to them if not so fond of them that we even consider them friends. And yet as we grow in life, some of them start to slip and slide into cravings we don’t have quite so much no more.

Until we’re stressed out about something or angry about something or just don’t feel all that well all of the sudden.

Then suddenly those well-known comforts seem even more comforting. Even more friendly. Even more able to give us at least a moment spent doing something we know to feel good, to taste good, to sound good.

So we give in because, again, life’s just worn us out and left us so disinterested and disengaged that it doesn’t really seem to matter if we take a moment to just try and feel better.

Is that not a failure?

Giving in to past sins, things we’d at once determined we didn’t want to do anymore simply because we don’t like what we’re going through or how it all has us feeling for a moment?

Is failure always only momentary? Or might it actually have costs and consequences which echo through eternity?

Indeed, just because we can’t see just how long eternity is, which is thus a failure of our eyes or minds to encompass its particularly endless fullness, does this mean that eternity fails to see us?

Is all of this truly about us or have we just fallen for that failure at humility so many times that we actually believe is could be or should be?

Should it?

Should all of life be all about us?

Have we managed to find anything worth having, anything feeling worth feeling still inside all those days we’ve spent living as if that were the case?

Or has not our failure to find anything worth having, feel anything worth keeping only stood continually proving that we’re still proving failures in regard to knowing what we’re doing as is told in the fact that we’re all here still looking for something better than the entire sum of everything we done, wanted, won under the sun?

Is not that choice to live as if all that matters is all that’s here only a failure to care about everything that isn’t quite so temporary as to fit inside a world fit for disaster, such as those seen inside every single day anymore, and thus too eventual destruction thanks to that fact that we all continue to fail, to fall short, and that of what is the example we’ve been given according to which we should be living?

Are we?

Are we even trying?

Or, as seems obviously more obvious, are we just still lost in the crowd of those many others who just don’t care to try much of anything as we all seem to agree that not trying is the surest way to not fail?

Isn’t our failing to try still a failure?

Sure, doesn’t seem to bring with it that same sense of shame or embarrassment as, well, you can’t mess up what you don’t try or attempt. Can’t fall short of something you don’t reach for. Can’t disappoint that or those to which or whom you give not the respect that would inspire you to seek an outcome other than letting them down.

But should we really agree to treat and see even ourselves that way so often as we do?

Take the gym example again.

Is it really the best possible option/outcome to apparently see ourselves unworthy of the hard work it would take to make ourselves look better, feel better, live better, healthier, stronger and thus more able lives?

Are we really not worth the time spent trying to try to try and become something better than we are at the moment?

What about our families? Are they not worth our being the best we can be? Are they not worth our putting in work to ensure our bodies can withstand the strain that comes with holding a family together in a world that tries to tear everything apart? Are they not worth the effort spent reading, studying, learning whatever we feel we need to so as to make sure that we’re wise enough to lead them in this land of the lost?

What about our friends? Are they not worth our willingness to speak the truth? Are they worth our laughing as they fail and fall apart, something we agree to simply because they ask us to, expect us to?

What about God?

Is He not worth our worry, our respect, our fear? Our life?

Indeed, what about life? Is this gift not worth more to us than our commonly sought comfort found always inside whatever the status quo may be? Are all the chances, choices, changes and opportunities truly worth so little that we don’t mind if we fail them?

Is it at all possible to honor God should we care so little about living such good lives amongst the pagans that we continually just opt to fall back in among them, doing as they do, caring about whatever they do, discounting whatever they expect us to?

Can we not see that the world around us is failing in ways that will eventually prove fatal?

Doesn’t that inspire us to try and stop falling so similarly short ourselves?

Again, exercise. We see the average life-span shrinking all the time thanks to this time in which we live in which we love food more than we do ourselves as is seen inside how much easier we believe it is to eat an entire package of oreos than we assume it isn’t to take a walk around the neighborhood. Same amount of time. Just time then given unto what will soon prove a very different outcome as a heart attack is nothing like being able to play with your kids.

Or again, eternity. We’ve all chosen to take sin so very lightly that we all seem to think it vastly more easy than reading some really old book filled with names we can’t pronounce and rules we know we’ve failed to uphold. Indeed, so much harder to see a God we know nothing of in a place we’ve never cared to seek, seeing as how we’ve all assumed this world our home, than it is to see this world as our home seeing as how we still seem able to see so much that’s so exciting and inviting in this place.

Even the sins which have been our friends longer than we’ve ever cared to see He’s tried to be.

Indeed, seems that still we see Him as the One who eats with sinners and losers and freaks, assuming then Him to be much the same.

Failing then to see why He ate with them.

Wasn’t to applaud them nor learn from them. Rather it was to show them their flaws and faults so as to perhaps inspire them to stop settling for such failures.

Failures we’ve all settled for because we somehow don’t see settling as a failure.

But it is.

In fact it’s arguably the worst failure of them all because it’s the one in which we simply choose to stop trying. To accept where we are, who we are, whatever it is that we’re doing inside a life that we still dare define as one in which we’re winning?

What are we winning so long as go on sinning and falling short of the glory of God?

Except our share of the wrath promised in failing to care about what He sees in us, hears from us, thinks of us?

What does He think of us?

Cross doesn’t fail to tell us.

We just fail to hear it.

Because the cross tells us that, yeah, we’re all sinners and that, as such, we deserve to suffer, to hurt, to lose, to die. But it also says that even as these sinners we are, these failures we so often choose, yes, CHOOSE to be, He still loves you and me so much to take that suffering, that hurting, that losing, that dying for us so that we might see in His doing so what both our failures look like and yet what His refusal to also looks like.

Surely we can’t still fail to understand the difference.

Sadly it’s clear that most here still do in fact as most here go on sinning as if there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

But friends, what could be more wrong than continuing to willfully wrong the very God who gave us life? What could be more heartbreaking, more disappointing than continuing to fall short of His glory in a life spent seeking our own?

Indeed, what can we do with glory?

No, we don’t need all this glory we seek for ourselves but rather to see that there is none waiting to be found in our failing to find that there’s something better upon which to spend this life. And that’s honoring God as is done only in admitting that we’ve made sport of dishonoring Him. In falling short of Him. In failing Him thanks to all the sin we’ve not failed. No, we are masters as sinning, got it down to an art.

All because we can’t see the failure it is nor where it promises to lead.

Which is why He promises us new hearts and that very different Spirit we talked about yesterday. One not of fear and thus certainly not of the failure we so often opt for because we are so often afraid. No, rather it’s a Spirit of power and love and, what? Self-control. A Spirit which asks that we control ourselves, that we deny ourselves, that we fail ourselves so that we don’t fail Him anymore.

At least not as much nor as often.

That’s why He calls us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Him. It’s because He didn’t fail to take our place and overcome our death thanks to sin. Because those crosses He asks us to carry will not fail to kill in us, to kill from us all that’s long kept us from Him. And because our not failing to take them up and carry them, wanting then all that is in us that has kept us from Him to be killed, to be removed, it shows Him that we don’t want to fail Him anymore.

Because we can finally see we have.

And we just don’t like how it looks anymore.

Friends, we have all fallen short of who He created us to be. We have all failed to seek for His glory. We have all made a complete mockery of His mercy and misused it thinking it something we’re always guaranteed. Thankfully we still have this time in which to realize that His mercy offers to meet us now so that it can lead us toward where we should all want to be when this world fails to be an option to choose from.

For we’ll soon have but only two outcomes. One promises life everlasting whereas the other, well, only a forever failure thereof. Indeed, hell is filled with death unending.

Not sure how to spin that and make it seem like a winning outcome.

Sadly many here will continue ahead failing to care as to the promises ahead. Doesn’t mean we should do the same. Because even though we have, maybe this is one of the better examples we need in order to help us seeing that our trying something we haven’t yet, and probably struggling as we do, is undeniably a better choice than doing as we always have and continuing to prove quite good at it.

For after all, being good as doing wrong isn’t quite the something to brag about that most here assume it is.

It’s rather just a failure to be the better He created us to be and even died to give us the opportunity to see we so clearly have not been.

Do we remain failures in regard to our better?

Or shall we fail ourselves and seek for whatever better we can still be?

Which failure’s the worst?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold