I’ve been working on a few projects that are just stuck. My boss recently shut down some of them and I can’t help but feel like I wasted a lot of time on things that failed. This is difficult because I prayed diligently and worked hard on them. How can I let go of this frustration and feeling of failure?
If there’s one thing I’ve experienced in these last few months, it’s constant failure. With my available time cut in half, the ruthless 24-hour-a-day limit has closed more projects than I realized I was working on. In my case, and I suspect I’m not the only one, failure is a central part of life these days.
For many of us, work is fraught with “supply shocks”: we have less time, less access, less capacity, less support, and more demands than ever before. At the same time, we may be carrying more responsibilities due to aging parents, sick relatives, or children out of school. Our work, both formal and informal, requires more of us, but with fewer resources than before.
By ourselves, we cannot do more with less. Our work remains undone. Our bad temper brings out the worst in us. Our words are harsh and cruel. Hope evaporates. We become even more deeply focused on ourselves.
God made us finite and our world is broken. A boss who closes a project is a portrait of it. We cannot escape failure, but we can find hope in the midst of it.
Our failure is not God’s failure
First, what seems to us to be a failure, what could be a failure in our sight, it can be something else in God’s plan. Consider the first martyr. Stephen, star and gifted leader of the church, gave an impassioned defense of Christ and was stoned. Surely this seemed to some like a great evangelistic failure.
What seems like a failure to us, what could be a failure in our sight, may be something else in God’s plan.
Let’s be honest: Esteban would have stayed alive, and perhaps gained some friends, if he had moderated his language a bit. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a chase. Stephen would have had other opportunities to proclaim the gospel, care for Greek widows, and perform signs and wonders. Many good works died with Stephen.
But Stephen’s death forced the church to spread into Judea, Samaria, and beyond, just as they had been commanded but had not yet obeyed. And Stephen’s death probably touched the heart of the Pharisee who would become the greatest apostle to the Gentiles. Stephen’s behavior looks like a failure if you don’t read further than Acts 8:1. Or if you don’t realize that Stephen was obedient to death to the One who died for him.
God is sovereign over our failures, weaving all things together according to his plan. In what is closed by our boss or by the limitations of capacity and time, God may be working a greater good.
grace in humility
Second, there is grace in failure when we respond with humility (James 4:6). Only then will we find what we need to move forward.
Why do we need a Savior in the first place? Because we were never successful in any self-salvation project. Even our best works are full of injustice. It is when we admit our defeat that we can accept the redemption of Jesus.
We can find hope in our failure because God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.
We are always fighting against pride which, when it characterizes us, can crush us. When we are proud, our identity is found in what we can do, what we have achieved, what we have become. Our pride is the reason we can’t deal with falling short, and our pride is the reason we forsake God’s grace when we do.
But we can kill that pride by remembering the source of our deepest identity. As said, we are beings humans, no doers humans. We are not defined by what we do, but by what we are; actually, for To who we belong to him. We are defined by our belonging to the God who bought us. Even when we fail, in Christ we are not a failure.
Ultimately, God’s sovereignty and grace sets us free to fail. Because although us we cannot do more with less, God seems to be a specialist in doing just that. We can find hope in our failure because God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.
Originally posted on . Translated by Team Coalition.