Assorted

Navigating failure

Fear of failure can paralyze you.

There’s a lot to be said about how, in order to succeed, you need to be comfortable with failure – but that doesn’t erase the fact that failing feels painful and shameful. Who wants that? Better to avoid it. Suddenly success becomes less important than “not failing.” And the only sure way to avoid all the feelings that come with not being able to do something is to not try it at all. Not trying assures you of not failing. But in trying to avoid failure, you can hold yourself back from doing things in your path that God has given you to do.

So what’s a good way to navigate failure?

There are two different approaches I've taken at different times of my life to deal with this fear of failure. They both begin with a question. What would you do – or attempt – or explore...

1) …if you knew you couldn’t fail – that it was impossible?
2) … if you were free to fail?”

1. What if you could not fail?

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

I first came across this question in a book called Launching a Leadership Revolution, but asking this kind of question is a pretty common approach to working with a fear of failure. Why? Because this question can be clarifying: stop thinking about what’s holding you back and start thinking about what you’d really want to do if you could.

Once you know what you really want, then you can think about how to navigate the obstacles that might come up. If you never stop to think about what you really desire to accomplish, you could spend your whole life doing things that feel safe just because they feel safe, and miss what you might be uniquely suited to do.

But this question can also be disheartening, and it certainly was for me back when I first read it. Because the answer was – a lot more than what I was doing at that moment. I can’t count how many times the fear of terrible things happening to me stopped me, all because I couldn’t count on these terrible things not happening. And I’m not alone in dreaming of a world of failure-free achievement, judging by the number of self-help books that use this quote.

It is true that many successful people plowed on despite failure and in the face of more failure, but I couldn’t shake the nagging awareness of people who did plow on after failing and just kept on failing. I know failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it can feel terrible. And there’s no guarantee that “keep trying” will lead to success.

So I found it difficult to ignore the thought of failure, as this quote seemed to advise me to do. Or even to accept failure as part of the process.

The quote did, however, inspire me to dream about what I’d like to achieve with my life. It helps cut to the chase of what you really want to do, even if you feel at the moment that it’s unachievable.

Which brings me to the second approach.

2. What if you were free to fail?

“When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.” – James K.A. Smith, On the Road with St. Augustine

When you’re young, life is more about trying to make choices about what you want to do, and that must’ve drawn me to the first question years ago. Maybe I’m drawn to this second quote more now as I’m older and navigating the result of my own and other people’s failures. Here’s the full quote in context:

“Resting in the love of God doesn’t squelch ambition; it fuels it with a different fire. I don’t have to strive to get God to love me; rather, because God loves me unconditionally, I’m free to take risks and launch out into the deep. I’m released to aspire to use my gifts in gratitude, caught up in God’s mission for the sake of the world. When you’ve been found, you’re free to fail.”

Rest, rather than striving. Release rather than control. And the peace of God’s love, rather than approval conditional on success.

Humans judge on achievements. We compare each other, and we compare ourselves to each other, and in the age of social media it doesn’t take long to see how much we lack in comparison to everyone else.

But if life is about what we produce, what we show, and whether we’ve made good on the promise or potential we showed at one point, how can we ever find peace?

Good questions both

I still like both questions though.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail is for young people deciding what to do with their lives. They’re making decisions about paths to take. They’re trying to diagnose their passions.

What if you’re free to fail is for when you get a little older. It’s for those days when you’re dealing with the knowledge you have failed at various things. You DID fail. What does that mean? How do you handle it?

Failure hits us because we take it as a reflection of who we are and what we’re worth. But we’re urged to start from a place of acceptance – God’s acceptance.

Sometimes failure weighs on us because we know our sin is involved. Our feelings of guilt add to the pain of failure. But the beauty of this quote is that it prevents us from relying on “fixing” ourselves – God makes us acceptable. God loved us even when we were dead in our sins, and He promises us no sin can come between us if we turn to Him. God doesn’t ask us to overcome our failures before He loves us. He makes us new, and we can rely on that.

So this is not only about the type of failure you can learn from. It’s not just the kind of “failing so you know what to do better next time.” Not the kind of failing that life coaches advise you is good for you (“fail fast and fail hard!”). No, this applies to the kind of failing that seems completely futile, that seems to have no meaning and no lesson to learn. The kind of failure that can crush you and make you too paralyzed to do anything more.

You need the promise you’re accepted no matter what.

What we really need

Because here’s the thing about failure: you won’t avoid it. In a broken world, you will crash and burn at some point. But maybe we face failure for a reason – to be reminded that we cannot go through life on our own.

Failure forces us to face the reality we’re dependent on God. He has to take us through the next steps.

Both of the above approaches to failure are quotes from human authors. But the Bible reminds us that God promises to be there in all our shortcomings. In 2 Cor. 12:9 we read how God reminded Paul that, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” and in Phil 1:6 Paul reminds us that God “who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” What God started, He will finish, and we can rest in that assurance. In the end, none of us will be failures.

What we really need is not to reach certain milestones, to earn anything, or to look successful in the eyes of the world, but rather to learn that utter dependence on God. If you can let go and let God work out His plan for the world, you can trust He will bring everything to good. You can trust He knows the way even when you don’t.

News

Saturday Selections – Dec. 13, 2025

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One note: the last 90 seconds of this is just a commercial for a 3D printer, so once that starts you can hit stop.

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Australia is now banning kids under 16 from using social media. Hurrah, right? Well, as Rev. Witteveen outlines, there is a dark cloud to this silver lining – in keeping kids off, the government is implementing measures to further monitor everyone else.  But they'll use is responsibly, right? Social media is a big problem, but protecting our kids was always a parental responsibility, and if we hand it off to the government, we might not like what else they do with the power we're handing over to them. Remember the Australian government's response to COVID?

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The world has quite a pack of lies to sell. And God has something very different to say.

Surgery denied. Death approved.

A Saskatchewan woman, Jolene Van Alstine, who is suffering from a painful but treatable disease, has been approved for death-by-doctor (euphemistically called "MAiD"). As the linked article explains:

"We have a growing list of citizens choosing death because medicine has become a lottery →

• • a quadriplegic woman who applied for MAiD because she couldn’t secure basic home-care support
  • veterans offered MAiD instead of trauma treatment
  • homeless Canadians considering MAiD because they can’t survive winter

"And now a woman denied a simple, lifesaving surgery."

American conservative commentator Glenn Beck has come to the rescue though, offering to pay for Van Alstine to get treatment in the US.

The author's article doesn't rule out MAiD altogether, but pitches it as a last ditch option. But in doing so, she too has lost the plot. If death is medicine at any time, then on what basis would it not be a valid offering all the time? Why refuse any good option? And why can't it be a cost-cutting measure even? If it is valid to kill some to ease suffering, why couldn't it be valid to kill more, so as to more quickly and more cheaply, ease more suffering? When murder is medicine the only fixed line has been crossed – we've long treated abortion as healthcare, and killing the born in the name of medicine is just the next step. Offering Alstine death as treatment is entirely in keeping with this worldview.

But there is another understanding of life. Not as something we hold and can choose to dispose of as we will, but as something entrusted to us, to steward. Christians seem unwilling to raise God in the euthanasia battle, but if we leave God out of this conversation, what basis is there for human worth? The State gives you worth? Well, then the State can take away that valuation, as it has done for Van Alstine. We decide our own worth? Again, not so for Van Alstine. Outside forces, the province's neglect, have her devaluing a life she might otherwise treasure. Euthanasia's lie of autonomy – you will choose when you die – is here exposed.

We need to highlight her plight to showcase the antithesis between murders being medicine and all murders being always wrong because we are made in the very image of God. All God's people must proclaim God's sovereignty over life, for His glory and because only His Truth can answer these lies.

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