Failure is a four letter word in my book. Okay, I can count and I know it’s actually seven but I have spent much of my life treating it like a dirty word. To give you some insight into the stranglehold of that fear of failure has had on me let me share a little story from my youth.
I have always engaged in the arts and enjoy painting and drawing in particular. When my art teacher, Nancy, introduced me to watercolors I was in middle school. Neither she or my parents indicated that there was any pressure with taking up the new medium but remember shaking as I sat down to take up the brush for the first time. As we moved through the lesson, I excused myself several times to go into the bathroom because I was about to burst into tears, all because I was terrified that I would fail at this painting. After that lesson, when I would try a painting, if it did not go as planned I either burned it or bleached away the paint so there was no record of my “failures“. But at some point I began to realize this was holding me back, I loved to see the pictures emerge, if I destroyed the flawed ones I couldn’t see how far I had come. John Ortberg illustrates this in his book, If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat,
“A book called Art and Fear shows how indispensably failure is tied to learning.
‘The ceramics teacher announced he was dividing his class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right graded solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an A.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.’
Apparently, at least when it comes to pottery- trying and failing, learning from failure and trying again works a lot better than waiting for perfection. No pot, no matter how misshapen, is really a failure. Each is just another step on the road to an “A’. It is a road littered with imperfect pots. But there is no other road.”
We must learn to stop hating the process, with its risk of failure, in the quest for the flawless product, and instead just keep “churning” away. Jesus never tires of our trying, but He is saddened when we refuse to try at all.