Every successful person I have ever met has experienced failure and most of them have used each failure as a stepping stone to reach their success. In an interview a reporter once asked Thomas Edison to tell about some of his most disappointing failures. Edison simply replied, “I have never failed, young man. But I have successfully discovered tens of thousands of things that wouldn’t work.” One rule of sales success that I learned selling several different products and services in my younger days is this; every no, every rejection, brings you closer to a yes and a sale. The more people you talk to the more sales you will make. I’m convinced that the greatest obstacle to our success is not failure – it is the fear of failure.
The only way to avoid failure completely is to never try to do anything, especially something new. Likewise, the only way to avoid rejection and offending someone is to never engage anyone in a meaningful conversation sharing your true thoughts and feelings with them. The problem is that as a Christian, you are also avoiding the opportunity to share your Christian testimony with others. Fear of failure and rejection are the enemy’s greatest tools to limit the power of your Christian life. What are the remedies?
The first thing we must do is expel all fear from our heart through the power of God’s perfect love. “Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is fear of punishment and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.” (1 John 4:18)
Once we are no longer afraid of failure or anyone’s reaction, we must pray for God’s guidance before each decision to speak or act. It doesn’t call for a complicated explanation to God, just a simple should I or shouldn’t I? Then quietly wait for God’s response through His Holy Spirit. If you don’t wait for God’s answer, you are just leaving a message on His voicemail and hoping He will get back to you sometime. God will answer yes, later or no to all of our prayers. Paying attention and being obedient will keep us from a lot of mistakes or failures. We are still human though, and I think it was Shakespeare who wrote, “To error is human, to forgive is divine.” Humans make mistakes and fail sometimes and it isn’t just others we must forgive as Christians, but we must also forgive ourselves just as God forgives us when we repent.
We have all heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. We must learn from each failure or mistake. I’m sure Thomas Edison never repeated any of those experiments that didn’t work. That is one of the main reasons he was eventually successful. When we look at failure as a learning experience, it becomes less scary and even useful.
One warning, never let anyone, including you, make you feel like a failure. You are not a failure. Failure is what you do because you are human; it is not who you are. It is something you did and will not do again. The key is to keep participating in life, keep trying, keep listening and obeying until you reach the ultimate success of hearing our Lord say, “Well done!”