Failing Forward: Final in a 3-Part Series
When Eyjafjallajökull, a barely pronounceable volcano in Iceland, erupted in April 2010, the ash cloud it produced grounded all air travel across Europe for six full days. It left Colonel Stanley McChrystal, commander of the Afghan War, and his staff stranded in Paris. Journalist Michael Hastings was scheduled to be with the colonel for only two days in Paris in preparation for a profile piece on McChrystal. Renegotiating travel plans for the millions who were stranded expanded Hastings’ two days with McChrystal into a month, too long to be officially on the record without letting hiss guard down.
When the McChrystal profile, “The Runaway General,” was
published in Rolling Stone, it
exposed controversial opinions regarding the Afghan War and U. S. leadership
that McChrystal let slip during that month-long interview. Instantly,
McChrystal became an embarrassment to President Obama, who accepted McChrystal’s
resignation.
In discussing the event with Guy Raz, host of NPR’s Ted
Radio Hour, McChrystal said, “Sometimes curve balls don’t curve, and you just
move on.” Almost four years after the incident, the colonel admitted he wasn’t yet
fully recovered from the sting of that failure, proving that moving on can be
harder than he made it seem.
Knowing how to move forward after a big failure is an
essential life skill. It’s not the failure itself that matters most, but what
we do next.
God can teach us how. He is a friend who sticks closer than
a brother. He is our bridegroom and Abba Father. He’s been meeting us in our
failure since Eden. But sometimes he turns failure into success so slowly, it’s easy to
miss what he’s doing, if he reveals it to us at all.
God called Jeremiah to be his mouthpiece, then told him
his message would be repeatedly rejected. Jeremiah’s failure was so massive that his rejection was accompanied by hatred, imprisonment, and bodily harm. On the
surface, it looks like God commissioned Jeremiah to the express frustration of years
of failure.
In the middle, so much can look to us like failure, and the
middle can be agonizingly long. But what if what looks like failure in the
middle of our stories is actually a long route to something better?
When Jeremiah’s prophecies about coming judgment finally were fulfilled, Israel was defeated and forlorn. This turn of events in the context
of Jeremiah’s decades-long message of judgment made his message at that precise
moment—words of hope this time—sound all the sweeter. The years of failure
through rejection turned out to be necessary to the ultimate and unexpected
gift of hope he delivered in the face of utter despair.
Look at the story arc of the Bible itself. God walked with
us in the garden at twilight in Genesis. When being present with us came to an
abrupt end with our sin, God came to us again, this time in the flesh—a closer
togetherness. When Jesus left the earth, he sent the Holy Spirit to live within
us—even closer. And still to come is the extraordinary togetherness God has
planned for us—a marriage in heaven, the complete and perfect union never to be
broken again. He moves us from Eden to Heaven with an abundance of seeming
failure in the long, long middle. Knowing the end in advance, the middle can
look like wisdom being gained or a necessary learning process. The long, hard
middle is not a failure at all.
We see it in Christ, who showed us that detours from a
straight path to success can lead us to unspeakable suffering, death, and a
grave, but they don’t have to be failure and loss in the end. Instead, his detour
turns out to be the most excellent, and the only, path to success—the very best
set up for rising again.
In his Ted Talk in 2012, Colonel McChrystal shared that he
learned leadership by example from his superiors in the U.S. army as he slowly
climbed the ranks. He recounted an occasion when a training
exercise he commanded failed. The leaders gathered all involved for a
debriefing to teach them by berating them for what they did wrong. McChrystal
calls it “leadership by humiliation.” Feeling lower than low, he left that
meeting and apologized to his battalion leader for letting him down.
The battalion leader said, “Stanley, I thought you did
great.”
McChrystal says that one sentence set him firmly back on his
feet and taught him that leaders can let you fail and not let you be a failure.
When McChrystal expected salt in the wound from his superior, he received a
balm instead. “It forever bound me to that man,” McChrystal said. When our
superior reaches through our shame and offers compassion, kindness, and a way
forward, it has that binding effect.
That experience colored the leader McChrystal would become
and the way in which he approached and interpreted his failures that were
still to come, including the botched interview and embarrassing article.
What McChrystal’s superior did for him in his failure, Jesus
does for us. The balm is sprinkled throughout Scripture: he came for the sick
not the healthy; where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more; his power is
made perfect in our weakness. He’s telling us that he’s letting us fail,
without letting us be failures.
While it’s easy to view ourselves through the lens of
failure and doubt, God views us through his better ending, our perfect union,
and his ultimate victory. When we see the scriptural glimpses of how God uses
failure in our lives, we can know hope instead of ruin, rise above our shame,
and dare to deal more gently with ourselves in our future failures.
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