The Hard Grace of Failure

1. What Failure is Not

Who likes failing?

These days, maybe some people would be clever and say they do. But what they mean is not really failure in the sense I'm talking about. I'm not talking about delayed success.

Now I know in the past few decades, piles of profound motivational statements have been made about failure and how important it is. I don't have to recount a list, you've seen many of them I'm sure. Edison failed how many times before he hit on a successful design for the incandescent bulb? (It seems no one knows... I saw 700, 1000, 2000, and 10,000)

Speaking of fails... Edison begs to differ

Uh-oh, an escalation of inspiration. Someone call Oprah.

That is not the kind of failure I'm talking about. Those are not really fails, those are attempts, experiments. "Cross that one off the list and get the next one" is not failure, it's a kind of confirmation.

2. Failure of a Sort

Not winning the presidential election is getting closer to actual failure. Half the country is angry and disappointed, maybe more at the other side, but still many will be angry at you. The best you could probably do is try again and succeed in four years, but even then it's not the same. However, you'll probably still do ok. You can leverage your now-massive name recognition somehow. That's also not really failure, it's more like what used to be called a "pivot" in business-speak. (Maybe it still is. Maybe I'm also using the term incorrectly... I'm an engineer by trade, pivots are things that require memorizing force equations)

Taiwanese students know about failure. There's an national university entrance exam at the end of high school, and how you perform on it has a profound impact on the rest of your life. Doing poorly on that test (there are a few limited options for retesting, but it's not like the SAT where you can take it multiple times and use your best score) means a low-tier college, a low-tier job, and fewer alternate paths to success than in America (even America circa 2015). In the US, even with bad grades or a degree from a lower-tier school, if you hustle*, you can nearly always be successful. In Taiwan, you have to do that anyway to keep your job.

(*- Apparently the positive connotation of this word is not universal. I use it in the sense of getting out there and working harder and with more focus than the average person, not selling drugs or deceiving people)

There is also heroic failure. This is the kind of failure that is irreversible, but where the importance lay mostly not on success but on being willing to try. The firefighter that does not succeed in getting the last person out of a burning building may be haunted by his failure, but we do not blame him for it, we praise him for the attempt, for his courage, even for his grief over not having succeeded. (We wouldn't praise him nearly so much if he shrugged it off as one of life's inevitable tragedies)

Failure is not lead that can be alchemied into gold. In reading for this entry I stumbled across this quote from Elizabeth Hardwick, and felt it strikes a chord:

"Failure is not funny. It is cockroaches on the service elevator, old men in carpet slippers waiting anxiously by the mail slots in the lobby, neighborhood walks where the shops, graphs of consumption, show only a clutter of broken vases, strings of cracked beads, dirty feathers, an old vaudevillian’s memorable dinner jacket and decades of cast-off books—the dust of ambition from which the eye turns away in misery." (from Grub Street: New York)

So how about real failure? What about the firefighter who not only fails to find the trapped child, but fails to find the courage to go look at all? What about the child of brilliant parents who just can't manage to ever do well in school, year after year, regardless of her effort? What about the man who fails to get help for his addiction and drags his family down with him?

Even those stories could end in redemption. You can probably imagine movies where the low point is any of those situations, but somehow manages to end triumphantly.

Failure of the kind I'm talking about is irredeemable. It's not noble, it's not "failing upwards," it's not one small step in the long road to victory, it's not even the nadir, the lowest point, at which one begins to climb back up from the pit again. It's an unrecoverable loss. It is coming to the end and there being no road ahead, no further options. Final failure. We don't even like to contemplate it.

It's also absolutely necessary to understand ourselves and our salvation.

3. Failure to the Point of Surrender

Its necessity doesn't make it any more pleasant- the real, visceral recognition that one cannot be good, that one cannot bring anything good to God in exchange for salvation, that attempting to do so will always end, finally, in failure. Discovering that Pelagius was so very wrong, though we long for him to be right in some little corner of our personalities. Some tiny hook from which to hang our righteousness, some shiny trinket unique to us, expressing our unique value, to trade for some slight reprieve from the terror of total surrender. To finally realize that we have nothing with which to redeem any part of ourselves back from the Redeemer is a devastating kind of experience. Some reach a point and then simply refuse to look further or go deeper; the continued loss of self is too terrifying. But Christ said only by losing our life can we save it.

As believers we think we've grasped this. We can say along with Jonathan Edwards, "you contribute nothing to your salvation but the sin that made it necessary," and acknowledge that it is true, but until we've really tried and failed, we don't get it. We are like addicts in that state of denial who still believe they can quit if they just put their mind to it. Next time, for sure.

Truly recognizing your failure before God is an extremely unpleasant experience. If you have not had such an experience, it's possible you haven't tried to fully surrender to God. When you do, He will show you something you were holding on to, and you will try to argue you should get to keep it. And you are quite likely to base that argument on some goodness or good behavior on your part that justifies a trade. Finally realizing you have nothing to offer, that you are merely a recipient of grace upon grace, you may surrender, until you are called to surrender again in the future, more deeply. And on it goes.

So when Paul says in Philippians 3 that what he once counted as gain he now counts as σκύβαλον (dung, rubbish), he is speaking as someone who has emotionally grasped how utterly comprehensive is human failure. His credentials didn't matter, his zeal wasn't "a valiant if misguided effort," he had nothing, no ground to stand on. That's what he's saying in the passage: if anyone should have had a standing with God, a bit of a starting point from which to barter, any confidence in the flesh whatsoever, it would have been he, and he could see that it was all rubbish. Paul had nothing- except Christ, who is everything.


That recognition of our total failure to have, do, or be good -to bring anything at all to the bargaining table with God- is like a kind of death. Although we recognize it when we repent and believe in Christ, it's something we experience repeatedly in the sanctification process, part of maturing in Christ, as God burns away the dross. We believed truly then that we could not save ourselves; now we experience the fact more and more fully with each painful recognition and admission of our failure. 

If you want a god you can barter with, come to Taiwan. That's religion here.

This is yet another reason the prosperity gospel is no gospel at all. Without failure, without falling on our knees in recognition of our abject spiritual poverty, we do not learn to grow more deeply into God. God's blessings are but one way to experience Him. If we love God and not merely His blessings, we must continue down the path of self-abnegation that sometimes comes only with pain and brokenness. There is no promise to name and claim which skips over the valley of the shadow of death.


But the joy grows, if we are willing to surrender. When in the deep darkness of our new awareness of utter failure the door of grace opens, leading further up and further in, we become more and more willing to grasp the offered hand.To reject it either in pride or despair leads only to bitterness and fruitlessness in the Christian life; yet more fully and painfully aware of our failure, yet refusing to let His grace heal us that much more deeply. Instead we must be recklessly humble, casting aside the reasonable-sounding temptation to reject the gracious consolation of the one who allowed the pain. Bow and worship instead, for it was His pain which earned our grace.