The faith to fail.

Could you pray this prayer?

As I’ve spent the summer recharging, resetting, and re-examining in preparation for the inevitable long hours and slight chaos of my book launch in October, I’ve been thinking. A lot. There is so much I can’t wait to share with you. I think my writing will reflect the lessons I’m learning.

But there are some things that are just clawing to get out that I can’t keep in anymore. This post is one of them. It focuses on a prayer I’ve prayed several times this summer, and that prayer is birthed out of a lesson I’m learning. About myself, about God, and about this life.

Here’s the prayer:

Lord, give me the strength and the faith to fail.

Oh, how that little prayer has wrecked me. Absolutely wrecked me. There is so much behind it.

For starters, God has been showing me how defensive I can get. At the smallest things. But what’s behind that defensiveness? For me, a major factor is the fear of failure. How does that work? Well, to be wrong in my mind has always meant failure. To not know something has always felt like a massive deficiency. The phrase “I am wrong” is not a description of my actions, but a description of my identity, unfortunately.

Why? I’m still trying to figure that out. I haven’t gotten that far. But for now, the Lord has shown me that I fear being wrong, and that’s because being wrong equals failure.

Anyone else there? Anyone ever feel that way? Anyone struggle with that even slightly?

It’s not that this fear of failure is necessarily a new revelation. For as long as I can remember, when someone asked me my greatest fear I would quickly say, “Failure.” I’ve known this for some time. But what I didn’t realize is how so many of my actions are driven by it. The arguments with my wife. The anxiety with my job. The failure to be at peace and rest in this season of life where so much is out of my control.

So what do I/we do about that? Well, as I’ve been meditating on this my strong conviction has been that this fear of failure is really a lack of faith. A lack of trust. I don’t actually believe in all parts of me that God will take care of me. I feel that I have to perform. For him, maybe, but mostly for other people. Because their approval is what matters most. Their approval defines me. If they doubt my knowledge or intellect, then it destroys me.

What an awful way to live, I’m realizing. Because I will never be enough for everyone. I will never be smart enough. I will never know everything I can know. I will never be right on everything. No matter how hard I try.

Instead, my comfort has to come from the fact that God loves me no matter what I know. What I do. How I perform. Not just for him, but for others.

It’s where your comfort needs to come from, too.

Romans 5:1-6 speaks to this:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we boast in hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not put to shame, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

Friend, I don’t know where you are at in life. But if there is anxiety, discontentment, anger, or agitation consistently present, I wonder if maybe you have a fear of failure that is really a lack of trust.¹

If so, I want to invite you to say a scary prayer. A radical prayer, if you’re like me. But a prayer that just might be the first step to surrendering to God and changing maybe not your circumstances but how you approach them:

Lord, give me the strength and the faith to fail.

In other words, I invite you to be a failure.

Photo by Than Tibbetts on Unsplash

1. I want to be clear: I’m not saying that your mental health struggles are because of a lack of faith. I wrote a whole book on that lie. But what I am saying is that I think there are spiritual battles that we need to fight. I have both clinical anxiety and OCD that I treat with medication, and yet I also know that I have a lack of trust that God is taking care of me that contributes to even more anxiety in my life.