The Monday Memo from John Stanko

815: Is There Spiritual Value in Failure?

In case you are just joining the Monday Memo family, I have declared the week of August 6-12 to be Celebrate a Failure week the world over. Here are some ways to celebrate (you can also read more about failure on the Monday Memo site):

1. If you are a pastor, you can talk about failure in your Sunday services on August 6 or during your midweek gatherings starting on Monday, August 7. Someone once wrote me during a Celebration Week that there is no failure in the Bible. See if they're right. If not, then share what you find that can help people who have failed. You have plenty of them sitting right in front of you every Sunday.
2. If you are a business leader, why not talk about failure with the other leaders and staff? Do you have any failures to celebrate as a business or team? What did you learn from them? What is stopping you from creating new failures? What could you possibly achieve today if you weren't afraid of trying and failing?
3. You can celebrate as a family. You may want to study a biblical character who failed, like Samson, Moses, David, or Peter. Maybe there is some family story of failure that can be discussed and examined. Maybe you can even focus on some historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., great leaders who also experienced great failures at some point.
4. Classroom settings need not be left out of our celebration. If you teach, I would imagine that you can find enough teaching material to make up a classroom session or two when classes resume in September. History and science are full of failures that eventually led to success, of failures that provide significant lessons for your students.
5. You can reflect and journal about some of your more significant personal failures. I will be doing that in the coming weeks as I prepare my own personal celebration. What did you learn? Do you view that failure the same today as you did when it occurred?

THE QUESTION

This week, let's consider whether on not failure can contribute to spiritual progress. Let me start by quoting from Thomas Merton’s book, New Seeds of Contemplation:

Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt—failure being interpreted as “punishment.” Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow “at fault.” If he was not guilty, he was least “wrong.” And “being wrong” is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility, and identification.

Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy.

Merton said that failure to face my own humanity causes me not to accept the humanity of others. Failure is part of being human. You cannot serve God in the hopes that He will save you from your propensity to fail. If God did that, for example, He would not have commanded us to forgive one another. He knew we would fail one another and provided the means by which we could deal with it appropriately. God didn't say, "Now that you are mine, you won't be needing to forgive one another any longer." He was saying, "Now you can come to terms with your failure toward one another by forgiving one another."

Those who take refuge in a false sense of spirituality as they try to avoid human failure have already failed. If you don't fail, you won't try to succeed and if you don't try, you won't ever know which thing you can do is the thing you should do. If you don't fail, you deprive yourself of the great learning experience that only failure can provide. If you don't fail, you won't fully know or understand God's love that is with you no matter what.

THE ANSWER

So is failure part of spiritual development? Indeed it is, for it contributes to your spiritual growth by grounding you in your humanity. It's then that you know God's love and grace, and are able to share those with your fellow failing humans, not from a position of superiority, but from a position of identification.

 pray that you will have a profitable time leading up to August 6-12. I already have enough failures to cover the next ten Celebrate a Failure weeks, and I'm sure t I will collect even more material in the coming season of life! With that in mind, I look forward to celebrating my humanity and my spirituality with you in a few weeks. Thank God He still loves and uses us, even in our human condition. Have a great week!

814: It's Been Seven Years!

I can't believe how time has flown by. It has actually been seven years since I declared a celebration to observe, study, reflect on, and learn from a topic that has become near and dear to my teaching and writing career. What topic would that be, you may be thinking? Is it purpose, creativity, goal setting, or faith? Those are all worthy of consideration, but they cannot come close to the importance of what we going to celebrate the week of August 6-12.

Yes, I have designated that week to be Celebrate a Failure Week the world over! In case you are new to the Monday Memo since 2010, here is what you need to know to prepare for this festive occasion.

THE GROUND RULES

I recommend that you take every chance during the first week in August to talk about failure--its role in your life and the lessons you have learned from past failures. Here are some ideas of what you can do:

1. If you are a pastor, you can talk about failure in your Sunday services on August 6 or during your midweek gatherings starting on Monday, August 7. Someone once wrote me during a Celebration Week that there is no failure in the Bible. See if they're right. If not, then share what you find that can help people who have failed. You have plenty of them sitting right in front of you every Sunday.
2. If you are a business leader, why not talk about failure with the other leaders and staff? Do you have any failures to celebrate as a business or team? What did you learn from them? What is stopping you from creating new failures? What could you possibly achieve today if you weren't afraid of trying and failing?
3. You can celebrate as a family. You may want to study a biblical character who failed, like Samson, Moses, David, or Peter. Maybe there is some family story of failure that can be discussed and examined. Maybe you can even focus on some historical figure like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., great leaders who also experienced great failures at some point.
4. Classroom settings need not be left out of our celebration. If you teach, I would imagine that you can find enough teaching material to make up a classroom session or two when classes resume in September. History and science are full of failures that eventually led to success, of failures that provide significant lessons for your students.
5. You can reflect and journal about some of your more significant personal failures. I will be doing that in the coming weeks as I prepare my own personal celebration. What did you learn? Do you view that failure the same today as you did when it occurred?

WHY?

Why the need for such a celebration? And is it truly possible to celebrate failure? Should it not be tolerated at worst and avoided at best? We should celebrate failure because it is an inevitable part of life. We avoid failure because we believe it is somehow a measure of inadequate spirituality, and in some ways it is, because you will never measure up to the ideal of perfection on this side of heaven or the Lord's return. If you are going to do anything for God, whether to fulfill your purpose or achieve your goals, you will need to embrace the learning process that only failure can provide.

You can read what I have written about failure in past Memos, but let me quote one of my favorite authors, Parker Palmer, and what he had to say about failure in his book, The Active Life:

If I allow my life to be deformed by the fallen angel called “fear of failure,” I will never be fully alive. I will withhold myself from actions that might fail, or ignore evidence of failure when it happens. But if I could ride that fear all the way down, I might break out of my self-imposed isolation and become connected with many other lives, because failure and the fear of it are universal. I would learn that failure is a natural fact, a way of discerning what to try next. I would be empowered to take more risks, which means to embrace more life, and in the process I would become more connected with others. The monster called fear of failure (or ridicule, criticism, or foolishness, or any of the other fears that are so easy to regard as mortal enemies) would become a demanding but empowering guide toward relatedness.

But on this side of such an experience, we may wonder why we should anywhere near the monsters, let alone ride them all the way down. After all, they are monsters, and they do harbor powers of destruction as well as of creativity. Even if riding the monsters is the only way to reach safe ground, there is no guarantee that we will get there. People have fallen off before the end of the journey and have been stranded in some bad places. So why take the risk of riding the monsters in the first place?

[The reason is that] some monsters simply will not go away. They are too big to walk around, too powerful to overcome, too clever to outsmart. The only way to deal with them is to move toward them, with them, through them. We must learn to befriend some of these primitive powers that seem so much like enemies. In the process we will find them working for us, not against us, working for life, not death.

What are you afraid of? Is some past failure or the fear of a future one keeping you ineffective and paralyzed? Are you so afraid of missing God’s will for your life that you are missing God’s will for your life? This is why we need a Celebrate a Failure Week. It's not to glorify failure but to set the stage for success. That may not make sense at this point, but if you follow along for the next few weeks, you'll understand how it works.

Therefore, get ready for a big celebration, for we all have some colossal failures to celebrate and some important lessons to review. We want to get failure working for us and not against us, so with that in mind, let the party begin. Have a great week as you make preparations for the big event.

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813: I Have a Mental Health Condition

You have read the headline and perhaps are thinking, "I have known this for some time. I am glad he finally realized it." I have known this truth about myself for some time too, and I am learning to confront it on a daily basis. That is the good news. The bad news is that you have a mental health condition too, but the good news is that you can deal with it too, just like I am.

THE DEFINITION

Here is a definition I retrieved from the National Alliance on Mental Illness:

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function every day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis. Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process. A mental health condition isn't the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

Much of what that definition says is true, but I would disagree with one point. The experts say that "a mental health condition isn't the result of one event." I would argue that it is and that one event is known as the Fall of man. When Adam and Eve decided to eat from the tree of the knowledge of God and evil, they unleashed the cause of my mental condition (and yours). Even when my mental condition may be caused by genetics or faulty brain function, I can trace that problem back to the Fall, for God did not create man with any defect (remember, He kept declaring that what He made was "good"?). Sinful thinking was my problem, is my problem, and will continue to be my problem, and I dare say the same is true for you. The fact that my thinking has been so wrong for so long that when I confront it, I am facing a lifetime of accumulated wrong thoughts.

(I realize there are some genetic defects that hinder or prevent normal brain functioning, and I am not addressing those. My point is that the main function of our mental capacity is to think and that function has been deeply impaired and the problem reinforced by wrong thinking, which has impacted my moods and behavior.)

YOUR THINKING

Isn't your thinking the source of your feelings and moods? Isn't your thinking the source of yours (and my) addictions to shopping, anger, fear, and/or anti-social behavior? Paul wrote an interesting passage in regards to our thinking in 2 Corinthians 10:4-6: "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete."

In fact, Paul introduced another root cause for my mental condition and that is demonic activity! My thoughts that lead to my moods and behaviors can have their origins in divine powers that want to keep me enslaved and prevent me from obeying God. All this wrong thinking requires some measure of resistance on my part, as our definition above stated as well: We must play a "strong role" in our own recovery process. Paul would agree and say we must take every one of our thoughts captive to the obedience of God's word in Christ.

For me to play a role in my recovery, I must be aware of my thoughts - I must think about what I am thinking about. I must put it under the microscope, send it off for lab results, or put it through a series of x-rays to determine if my thoughts are the source of my mental condition that is hindering my effectiveness and my relationships with others. When I find that they are, then I must wrestle and fight to change those thoughts. If I take a "strong role" in the power of the Spirit, I can reverse this mental condition, which seems to be a lifetime process as I express my faith in Christ.

I am not fighting my diagnosis, and I urge you not to fight as well. I am the source of my own problems, and I can hasten my healing by not fighting the diagnosis or the cure, and that cure is aligning my thoughts with God's thoughts. The Spirit came to give me the mind of Christ, and I must be aware that this does not come naturally or easily, but only through spiritual effort free from my addiction to control the process. I must stop eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and feast on the fruit from the tree of life. When that happens, my diet of right thinking will deliver me from my condition, and it will do the same for you. Have a blessed week!

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bvqXQ4KG.dpuf

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bnWdqv2u.dpuf

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bnWdqv2u.dpuf

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bnWdqv2u.dpuf

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bnWdqv2u.dpuf

A mental illness is a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone's ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.

Recovery, including meaningful roles in social life, school and work, is possible, especially when you start treatment early and play a strong role in your own recovery process.

A mental health condition isn’t the result of one event. Research suggests multiple, linking causes. Genetics, environment and lifestyle influence whether someone develops a mental health condition. A stressful job or home life makes some people more susceptible, as do traumatic life events like being the victim of a crime. Biochemical processes and circuits and basic brain structure may play a role, too.

- See more at: https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions#sthash.bnWdqv2u.dpuf

812: Mighty in Battle

Last week, we looked at David's attempt to rescue his wives and possessions that had been taken hostage by a raiding party when David and his men were away. They set out on their mission with only the word of the Lord to proceed, but didn't really know where to go or how they would find their loved ones. On their way, however, they met a young Egyptian servant who had been with the raiding party and knew where they were. After he was promised asylum, he led David's men to the camp they were looking for, and they were able to rescue and reclaim what was theirs.

The lesson is that David found help after he set out to accomplish the goal, not before. The information he needed came to him, but first he had to commit to the journey. Only then did he find the way to success through a miraculous provision. Can you use this lesson in your own purpose journey?

I have encountered people who have a clear mandate and burden to do something. Yet they tell me things like, "I'm praying about it," but they really aren't. Sometimes they tell me, "I don't have the education or training," or "I am not spiritual enough; I have to get this or that fixed in my life before I go and do." Have you ever offered those excuses? Are you employing them now in some aspect of your life, ministry or work?

You may truly need more training or education, and you may need to address a lack or problem in your life. Yet those issues don't disqualify you from doing something today to see God's will furthered in your life. Usually, you can address your issues while you are fulfilling your purpose instead of before even trying to fulfill it. Don't try to figure out all the implications of God's will before you start doing it; start doing it and make your changes and improvements as you go.

MIGHTY IN BATTLE

Hebrews 11:34-35 states, "Whose weakness was turned to strength, and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies." I thought it interesting that the heroes of the faith didn't wait until they had strength, rather they received strength after they entered the battle. You may be saying to yourself, "If God gives me strength, I'll go and do." Instead God is saying, "If you go and do, I'll give you the strength, wisdom, power, ability, information, money, resources -- whatever it is that you need." If you are waiting to be ready to go before you are ready to go, you may never be ready to go.

Are you procrastinating, delaying the first steps you need to take where your purpose or goals are concerned? What excuses have you come up with that sound logical, which have almost become second nature to you? Are you ready this week to face the truth of why you are delaying? I hope you are, for God knew of your lack and weakness before He gave you the idea or directive. In spite of your lack, He is offering you a chance to fulfill your purpose. Are you ready to stop delaying and to take action? Can you trust God for the provision after you create the need? This week could be the week when you finally stop asking questions and offering excuses. I hope it is and that you have a great week!

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