The Monday Memo from John Stanko

862: Go and . . . Sin No More

After a week off, we continue with our series focusing on Jesus' words "go and," highlighting the fact that Jesus always put people in motion, so to speak, because faith always requires action of some type. In John 8, there is the story of the woman who was caught in adultery whom the religious leaders brought to Jesus for sentencing. Jesus gave the woman instructions to "go and . . .," and it is that encounter that is the next installment in this series. Let's go there now.

SETTING THE SCENE    

This story raises a few questions that are impossible to answer but first, let's look at the narrative itself:

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin" (John 8:1-11).

 The questions this story raises are:

1. Why did they only bring the woman and not the man caught in adultery?
2. What was Jesus writing on the ground?
3. Why did the older leaders leave first and then the younger?

We will not take time to speculate on these questions, for we can only surmise and postulate the answers. instead, let's focus on Jesus' response to the woman's alleged sin.

SIN

When Jesus was left alone with the woman, He said that He would not condemn her and then He in essence told her, "Go and stop it!" He did not send her for counseling; He did not lecture her once everyone was gone. He did not remind her of what the Law said. He did not tell her He was disappointed in her. He told her to go and sin no more. What does this tell us?

It tells us that we can too often wallow in our failures, convinced that we must go through major "reconstruction" before God can use us or even have fellowship with us. This encounter reminds of Saul's encounter on the Damascus road. God did not beat Saul over the head with his sin; He simply told him to stop kicking against the goads and then gave him a purpose assignment to the Gentiles.

Perhaps you read this and think I am making light of sin, which of course is terrible and causes repercussions that often affect other people (think of the problems that David's sin caused for his family as one example). Even in David's case, however, God still used and had close fellowship with David. Of course, the best strategy to follow is not to sin. In case that strategy fails, which it usually does, then you must learn how to run to God when you fail.

Have you allowed your failures or weaknesses, even your sins, to disqualify you from fulfilling your purpose and being productive for God? Yes, get counseling if you need it. By all means make restitution and ask forgiveness where necessary. Do what you have to do to get back into the game, so to speak, even if you have to spend time on the disabled list. Jesus was not shocked or scandalized by the woman's sin and we should follow His example by not making sinners pay a higher price for restitution than Jesus would require. Have a blessed week!

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IN KENYA: I am here for two weeks conducting some leadership training and visiting my ministry partners. We successfully raised $2,500 for bunk beds for our orphans here, but that did not include the cost of bedding ($1,800). If you would like to make a contribution toward that expense, please do so using my website or sending a check to PurposeQuest, PO Box 8882, Pittsburgh, PA 15221-0882. Thank you!

823: Samson's Failure

In 2013, I wrote an article for the Charisma magazine on failure. I ran across the article the other day online and thought I would send the link along as a follow up to the Celebrate a Failure week we just held. Samson, the man who killed lions and many Philistines yet succumbed to the wiles of a beautiful woman, certainly qualifies as a man who failed, yet God used him in spite of his weaknesses, and God can and will do the same with you -- if you let Him.

Follow this link to the article and then let me know what you think by commenting on the site where this entry is posted. By the way, I will be in Oklahoma City speaking at Victory Church in both services next Sunday, September 3 (there will be no Monday Memo next week). I will send along the link to watch the message when it is available. Also, take 30 minutes to watch or listen to my message at my home church from last Sunday titled Kingdom Fruit, which I referred to in last week's Memo, "Where's Your Fruit?"

820: Celebrate!

It's time to celebrate a failure! In case you missed it, I have declared this week Celebrate a Failure week, asking that you take some time in the next seven days to focus on the important role that failure has played in your life or the lives of others. If I ask you to do that, it's only fair that I do the same, so here is a reprint of my all-time favorite professional failure. (You can read my entries leading up to this week on the site where they are posted.)

THE WORST CONFERENCE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

When I worked for a Christian music company, I helped plan and organize the worst conference in the history of the world! Our team was scheduled to be in Dallas, and we thought registrations were coming in slowly, but didn't think there was anything to worry about. Then we learned right before we were scheduled to be there that the postal service had lost our brochures, all 50,000 of them. Only a handful were delivered and that explained the low response.

Instead of canceling the event, we pulled out all the stops to spread the word that we were coming, confident we could still have a successful event. Were we ever mistaken! On the first night of the event, we had less than 1,000 people in a church that seated 5,000.  Right after we started the event, the sound system failed. When I returned from trying to work in the audio booth, I saw our lead musician on stage playing the guitar and trying to lead worship. (He wasn't known for his guitar-playing skills, believe me.) When he asked for the words to come up on the screen, it was then we realized that the projection system had malfunctioned. The bulb burned out and the church didn't have a spare. 

I ran backstage to try and print off some sheets with the words on them only to discover that the copy machine was broken. I got up to take an offering and apologized, saying that I felt like I should be paying anyone who happened to be there that evening. To make matters worse, the event went on to lose about $15,000. I realized that weekend that a bad event is like flushing a toilet. Once you flush, there isn't any way you can stop the process; you just have to let it run its course. 

TWO CHOICES

I had two choices after that disastrous weekend. The first was to quit, which I briefly considered. The second was to take three months between Dallas and our next scheduled event and study what went wrong. I chose the latter and we went through everything we did. We came up with a number of innovations and built in more than a few safeguards to make sure what happened in Dallas would never happen again.

By God's grace, our next event was a fantastic success. We introduced some changes that generated quite a bit of revenue, and our team was better prepared and focused. Today, I thank God for that terrible Dallas event and some others that followed. I learned more from those failures than I ever did from the good events. I also learned that a bad event isn't the end of the world. 

When a baseball player strikes out or a soccer player misses an open net, they don't go off the field and sit in the stands. They keep playing through their failure. In practice, they work on their technique but in the game they keep swinging and shooting. That's what you and I need to do as well. 

Don't ever let your failures discourage you, and don't give up on your dream. Accept that failure is a part of every successful person's life, including your own. Adjust your expectations, but don't quit!  Today I can organize great events because I organized some poor ones.

So bring out the confetti! Put up the banners and inflate the balloons. We have some celebrating to do! Don't let Celebrate a Failure Week end without taking the lesson of the week to heart: Failure isn't fatal or final unless you allow it to be. I hope you have a great week as you join with friends and their failures around the world as we stare failure in the face and laugh at its attempts to limit our effectiveness and creativity. As you do, I know you will have a great week!

Feel free to add your comments, failure stories, favorite failure quotes or other pertinent information on the site where this entry is posted.

819: Failure as Feedback

We are only one week away from “Celebrate a Failure” Week, during which I instill emphasize the notion that there’s no perfection this side of heaven, and that failure is a necessary albeit sometimes painful part of success, purpose, and productivity. If you would like to learn more about failure or how to celebrate, you can read my past Memos on the subject.
 
LET'S CHANGE THE NAME.
 
I’ve had many people tell me, “Dr. Stanko, I just can’t celebrate my failures. They are still too painful, or they don’t glorify God!” Even though I’ve written about this principle and even shared some of my own failures, you still may struggle with this concept of celebrating failure, too. That is why I’m proposing another name for failure, a name that is hopefully easier to accept. If you can’t embrace “Celebrate a Failure" Week, how about “Celebrate Some Feedback" Week? It isn’t as catchy, but I believe it’s just as accurate.
 
You see, failure is simply feedback. The feedback tells you that you need to make an adjustment because you are off course. When you accept this feedback, then you can make the necessary changes that will put you back on track and help you succeed. The astronauts that went to moon had to make a course correction every few seconds. If they had rejected the feedback of where they were, they would and could have shot right past the moon. They accepted where they were, however, and then did what they had to do to correct the situation.
 
I believe that our PurposeQuest is similar to what those astronauts encountered. For example, you send your manuscript to a publisher and they reject it. You should simply see this as feedback. You can change your manuscript to make it more acceptable, try another publisher, or write a whole new manuscript. If you experienced a broken relationship, you can reflect on that feedback and set a course that will make your next relationship more lasting and meaningful. If you started a business and you ran out of money, you can start again more intelligently as you use the feedback from the first business.
 
Failure is what you make of it. It can be devastating if you accept it as such. If you receive it as feedback, however, you can use it to do a better job and plot a new or revised course forward. The choice is yours.
 
WHO’S YOUR COACH?
 
I was watching a interview of an American baseball star recently, and it showed this man taking practice swings in the batting cage. Right behind the batter was his hitting coach, watching his every swing and giving him feedback. He was getting feedback on every swing, using that feedback to improve. As the season progresses, that batter’s batting average will be posted every day for all the world to see. He will have to face that feedback and then meet with his coach  every day to stay on course and be all that he can be.
 
Baseball players aren’t alone. Opera singers take lessons, and so do successful actors. Tennis players almost always have a coach who travels with them, helps them devise strategy, and provides immediate feedback on their performance. The most successful performers actually invite feedback—they encourage and even pay people to tell them where they are failing so they can improve. What about you? Who is your coach? What are you doing to encourage and process feedback?
 
I can answer the question in the title of this week's post by saying, "Yes, failure plays a practical role in life." It helps you be the best you that you can be. If you are serious about being a person of purpose, you must learn how to handle feedback, even the painful kind. If something isn’t working, you need to know that and learn what you can do to make it better.

Why is this so hard for spiritual people to grasp? Why do we feel that we have to do it alone? Why are we afraid to fail and learn from the failure? I leave you to come up with the answers to those questions in the coming week. As we approach “Celebrate Some Feedback” Week, you need to assess how much feedback you are prepared to handle. That will determine what success level you will achieve. As you prepare for August 6, I hope you have a good week of preparation.

818: An Important Addition

I have often written about failure and the role it plays in your development. Perhaps you have heard me present or read my four-question series designed to help people understand the important role that failure plays:

1. Is failure a learning experience?
2. Do you often learn more from failure than success?
3. Are you always to be learning and growing?
4. Then should you fail as often as possible?

Usually, people answer "yes" to the first three questions, but answer "no" or not at all on question four. I have come to see that I have been misleading people on that fourth question and I am here this week to tell you that I was wrong, or at least incomplete in my thinking where question four is concerned. You will have to read on to understand how I was wrong.

AN IMPORTANT ADJUSTMENT

I was teaching a class not too long ago and we were discussing failure, and it was then that I realized question four was incomplete. It should read

4. Then should you fail on purpose as often as possible? 

Think of the most famous example of failure in the world of business: Thomas Edison's discovery of the light bulb. Edison experimented and failed with thousands of materials to find the correct filament that would burn and give light for a long period of time. While you can say that Edison failed thousands of times, he failed with purpose. He was trying to achieve something and the achievement was so important and valuable to him that he persevered and eventually found success.

If you just set out to fail so you can learn, your failure will not be tied to anything important and will not lead you to any success. Therefore I was wrong when I urged you to fail. I am confident I am correct when I direct you to fail on purpose.

MORE EXAMPLES

A baby gets up every time he or she falls because the baby has purpose: learning to walk. You failed in school and gave wrong answer in the pursuit of learning. You did not hit every ball you swung at, did not make every goal you kicked a ball to score, nor did you hit every jump or foul shot.  Yet you kept swinging, kicking and shooting because you had a purpose to win and improve. You could tolerate failure because you had purpose.

What implications does this have for your PurposeQuest?  It has serious implications, for you will not tolerate or even allow failure unless it is in the pursuit of something that has overriding value, enough to keep you on the path to success no matter what the cost. What's more, you won't endure failure in searching for your purpose unless you see the value in the search and ultimate conclusion. Without that, you will be content with the status quo and endure failure if it leads to your success, which in that case is to preserve the status quo.

I am excited about my newfound discovery and adjustment that I know will help you comprehend how important it is to fail if you are in pursuit of something special. There are only two weeks to go, so I hope you are getting ready to celebrate a failure or two during the week of August 6-12. Until then, I am personally preparing for a wild celebration for I have had many failures on my way to success. Have a blessed week!

817: I Have Some Failures to Report

In case you just tuned in, I have declared the week of August 6-12 to be Celebrate a Failure Week the world over. The purpose of this week is to focus on the role that failure has played in your development and success. You can check out the previous weeks' posts to learn how you can celebrate, but the main way is to spend some time reflecting on failure, your response to it, and its possible benefits. So that you know you are not celebrating alone, I had a few failures this past week that I am celebrating, and I wanted to share them with you as we head toward August 6.

FAILURE NUMBER 1

As you may know, I started a publishing company a few years ago, and things have been going quite well. There are many challenges in publishing today, not the least of which is producing an author's manuscript with which they are pleased. I have been working with an author for the last 22 months and met with this author recently to see if we were ready to move on from writing to publishing. Over a meal, however, the author reported that the manuscript still wasn't satisfactory, and that the author had decided to move on in another direction. Bottom line: I had failed to produce something that was acceptable to my client.

What has my response been? I am celebrating! That failure has led me to re-evaluate my approach to editing, which in many ways has been passive. I have such respect for someone's creative project that I am sometimes too careful not to inject what I think will work in the process. It's too early to report any other conclusions, but I will continue to learn from that failure so I can be a better editor and coach.

FAILURE NUMBER 2

I am in the process of finalizing another container to Kenya that contains 25,000 library books, along with a lot of other supplies (you can read how you can help in my most recent blog entry). A friend and I went to a meeting of a unique group of women who meet four times a year to listen to projects that will impact women in the U.S. or around the world. They then vote, and the "winner" receives $100 from each of the women who are part of this organization. It is a great concept.

My friend and I went in January, made our presentation, but did win the vote. This past week we went and were not even selected to make a presentation. We failed! In January we struck out (or missed the penalty kick for my soccer friends), but in July we didn't even get into the game! What has my response been to that failure? It has been the same as a high jumper who knocks off the bar; I am ready to jump again!

I have revisited why I am doing what I do in Kenya in the first place. I have gone back and reminded myself of how the Lord has provided in the past. And I am praying more fervently than before I went to meeting, asking, "Lord, what am I missing? Open my eyes to see Your provision!" It is interesting that as I was writing my blog post this morning, someone donated $1,000 before I ever finalized the post! I am reminded today that God is able to provide for the shipping.

I am using both failures to be thankful for my successes. I am also using them as learning lessons along the way, so that they are not really failures, but installments in my education. My failures this week will make me a better writer, a better editor, a better servant of the people in Kenya, and for all those reasons and more, I celebrate my failures! Yes, they were humbling, but humility always comes before honor!

Do you have any failures you would like to share with my readers? If you do, then feel free to attach them as a comment on the site where this entry is posted.  Thank you and let's make August 6 a special day as we collect our failure stories, and give glory to God for His ability to bring good out of almost any bad situation.

816: Halls of Failure

In case you missed the announcement a few weeks, by the authority vested in me as a purpose coach and teacher, I have declared the week of August 6-12 officially to be Celebrate a Failure week the world over. During that week, I urge you to find every way possible to celebrate the powerful role of failure in your life or the life of your organization. You can read the last few Memos to discover some suggestions of how to celebrate. This week, however, I want to talk about the halls of failure, of which there are quite a few in my country. These are places where thousand of people come every year to honor those who failed regularly and with distinction in their careers.

Where are these halls of failure, you may ask? There is one in Canton, Ohio, another in Cooperstown, New York, and another in Springfield, Massachusetts, just to name a few. If you follow such things, you know that these are the locations of the professional baseball, football, and basketball halls of fame. Let's talk about why I call them halls of failure instead of the halls of fame.

FAILURE IGNORED

Let's first look at baseball (sorry to my non-U.S. readers). The best batters in baseball failed at least 65 percent of the time when they came to bat. The best pitchers failed as many as 40 percent of the time when they pitched, not to mention how many "non-strikes" they threw. The best fielders failed only about 10 percent of the time, but some of the managers remembered in the hall of failure lost almost as many games as they won.

In football, the hall of failure quarterbacks missed 50 percent of their pass attempts. The best running backs fumbled numerous times and the best defenders missed many tackles. In basketball, some of those enshrined in the hall missed 40 percent of their free throws. Others turned the ball over (gave it to the other team) hundreds of times and many lost games for their team when it counted most -- at the very end when they were the last ones to touch the ball.

You know that these halls where the greatest players are memorialized are not called halls of failure but instead halls of fame. They are places where thousands pay money to go and remember the greatest players, regardless of how many times they failed. In fact, no one even remembers how many times they failed. Their failures are ignored in the face of the successes they enjoyed.

FAILURE FORGOTTEN

What about the players memorialized in these halls of fame? What is their attitude toward failure? The statistics I quoted above are accurate; they did indeed encounter many failures in their careers. The key to great success for them was that failure did not define who they were or the legacy they left. Consider Michael Jordan, perhaps the most famous basketball player of the modern era and these facts about him in his own words: "I missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

The great players learn to forget their failures -- or at least to learn from them to improve. They study what they did wrong and what they would do again if faced with a similar situation. They failed so much that they learned how to succeed. More importantly, they did not allow failure to define them because they did not quit.

So what's your story? How many times have you failed? Truth be told, you probably haven't failed nearly enough to be successful. Have you allowed past failure to limit your attempts to succeed today? Have you allowed the voice of past failure to coach your play today? I'm not referring to your sports career, but to your attempts to write, act, lead or parent. If you don't learn to forget your failure, no one else will ignore it. That's why we are celebrating failure, so can laugh at it and move on to success, however you define success for your life.

Don't miss this wonderful chance to put failure in its rightful place as a teacher and mentor. Join with me on August 6 and the days following to put failure in perspective. If nothing else, take a moment now and then to reflect on the truth found in Romans 8:28: "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Talk about how God has worked God in and from your failure and then go out and do something great that your failure taught you to do. Have a great week and preparation time leading up to August 6.

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MINISTRY UPDATE: I just posted a ministry update to let you know what I am up to for the next few months or so. Please read it, pray, get involved, and support the work of my ministry as God leads you to do.

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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768 - Fear Review

I received two emails from people who are considering enlisting my services as a writing coach. Both emails were filled with fear as the people shared their fear of writing about themselves (fear of pride), of paying for the services (fear that God will not provide), and of whether their material was good enough to publish (fear of failure and inadequacy). One email talked about how it took all week to follow up on our initial correspondence due to "cold feet."

I have written in the past that the creative process is fraught with fear from beginning to end, and my experience of working with creative people the last two years has done nothing to change that conclusion. I am no longer surprised when I find fear in my own life, but instead I go looking for it, sort of like conducting a search-and-destroy military mission. I know my enemy is in there somewhere; I just have to find out where in my thinking my fear and shame are hidden and camouflaged.

Why are we so riddled with fear? There is a biblical answer and it's found in Genesis 3:7-10:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

Adam and Eve were afraid and ashamed of being exposed, so they hid from God. It's ludicrous for them to think they could hide from God, but they tried, and you and I try to hide as well. Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves - flimsy coverings that would wither and die in a day or two - but we use flimsy excuses to hide our fear and shame. Those excuses sound quite rational, but they are nothing but fig leaves in our minds to mask the terror we face when we consider doing something creative or new.

You may be nodding your head in agreement as you read this Memo. Yet, you can be in agreement and still be steeped in and paralyzed by your own fears, denying their existence. Or perhaps you have learned to manage your fears by sticking to the beaten path of life, careful not to veer off into the jungle of the unknown, where you have never been before. Until you take that path less trodden, you won't have to face or even be conscious of your fears. What's more, if you can wrap your fear in spiritual-sounding excuses, phrases like, "It's not the right season," or "The Lord hasn't released me," or "I am waiting on a confirmation," then you can comfortably learn to live with your fear, convinced that it is God's will that you be content with your daily routine, medicating your mind with thoughts of what you will do "one day."

My dear friends, this is the day that the Lord has made. You are not guaranteed tomorrow, so I urge you to face your fears today and move forward. We are children of Adam and Eve, and we all must take steps to emerge from the bushes of fear and shame so we can show forth the fullness of the glory that is ours in Christ. If we don't take those steps, then we will live a life far below what God had in mind when He sent Jesus to die for our sins. The choice is yours: How will you choose to live today?