{"id":4352,"date":"2025-01-17T07:12:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T12:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4352"},"modified":"2025-01-17T07:12:45","modified_gmt":"2025-01-17T12:12:45","slug":"facing-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/17\/facing-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Facing Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"695\" height=\"428\" src=\"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/FearGettingItRight.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4353\" style=\"width:375px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/FearGettingItRight.jpg 695w, https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/FearGettingItRight-300x185.jpg 300w, https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/FearGettingItRight-624x384.jpg 624w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 695px) 100vw, 695px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>To listen to today&#8217;s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/glennsreflections.us17.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=c4927dfbefb9749e5fef1581d&amp;id=9ce678a136&amp;e=5cd2a880e9\">click here<\/a><br>\u00a0<br>Hope is life\u2019s extraordinary antidote for discouragement.<br>\u00a0<br>That doesn\u2019t mean that success always comes easily.<br>\u00a0<br>Winston Churchill was once asked what most prepared him to sustain his lonely fight against Adolph Hitler throughout the 1930\u2019s (when many British leaders saw no danger in the Nazi regime), and how he found the courage to rally Britain again and again during World War II.\u00a0<br>\u00a0<br>Churchill answered that his greatest preparation came from having to repeat a grade in elementary school.<br>\u00a0<br>\u201cYou mean you failed a year in school?\u201d someone asked.\u00a0\u201cI never failed anything in my life,\u201d Churchill replied. \u201cI was given a second opportunity to get it right.\u201d<br>\u00a0<br>According to social psychologist Gilbert Brim, five of the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century\u2019s best-selling books were each rejected by more than a dozen publishers before being accepted:<br>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>M*A*S*H<\/em> (Richard Hooker) got 21 rejection letters.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Kon-Tiki <\/em>(Thor Heyerdahl) was thought unworthy of distribution by 20 publishers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Jonathan Livingston Seagull <\/em>(Richard Bach) heard \u201cno, thank you\u201d 18 times.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Auntie Mame <\/em>(Patrick Dennis) was rejected by 17 potential publishers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street <\/em>(the debut book of some guy named Dr. Seuss) got the thumbs-down 23 times.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Jonas Salk\u2019s first 200 attempts to find a polio vaccine came up short.&nbsp;He later reflected, \u201cI was taught not to use the word \u2018failure.\u2019&nbsp;I just discovered 200 ways how not to vaccinate for polio.\u201d<br><br>A remarkable slice of human experience \u2013 and a great many things that we will personally face before this new year comes to an end \u2013 can be labeled \u201cfailure.\u201d&nbsp;<br><br>Here we\u2019re including the experiences of the men and women who are typically applauded as \u201cBible heroes.\u201d Scripture, in fact, seems to go out of its way to spotlight the frailties and failures of its central human characters.<br><br>Moses was a murderer.&nbsp;The apostle Paul appears to have arranged serial lynchings.&nbsp;Abraham was a coward and a liar.&nbsp;Sarah was a vindictive schemer.&nbsp;David, \u201cthe man after God\u2019s own heart,\u201d was a murderer, adulterer, and consistently lousy parent.<br><br>Solomon, who was deemed the wisest man on the face of the earth, boasted 300 wives and 700 concubines \u2013 an astonishing relational track record that certainly calls into question whether he was in fact the wisest man on the face of the earth.<br><br>How about Jesus\u2019 disciples?&nbsp;All of them seem to have been in the slow reading group.<br><br>The most spectacular church buildings in the world are named for apostles who sometimes failed spectacularly.<br><br>The late author and pastor Tim Keller said it well:&nbsp;\u201cThe Bible is the record of God\u2019s intervening grace in the lives of people who don\u2019t seek it, who don\u2019t deserve it, who continually resist it, and who don\u2019t appreciate it, even after they have been saved by it.\u201d<br><br>In a fallen world, on this side of heaven, failure is inevitable.<br><br>But failure doesn\u2019t have to be final.&nbsp;How we <em>respond<\/em> to failure is what primarily shapes us.&nbsp;By God\u2019s grace, we are often granted a second or third or fourth opportunity to get things right.<br><br>Our great enemy in that quest is fear. Most of us dread the possibility of making a mess of things before the watching world.&nbsp;Fear keeps us from stepping out, taking risks, and attempting the audacious.&nbsp;<br><br><em>Such fear will never go away \u2013 <\/em>at least, not if we want to grow. That\u2019s because fear and growth are like chips and salsa.&nbsp;They go together.&nbsp;Whenever God beckons us into a season of growth and change, the fear of failure will almost certainly present itself. But God assures us that he is bigger than anything we will ever have to face, including the fears that come along for the ride.<br><br>Does it feel as if you\u2019re always facing problems?&nbsp;<br><br><em>That\u2019s a very good thing.<\/em><br><br>God helps us grow not by giving us the answers at the back of the book, but by providing problems that force us to choose between risk and comfort \u2013 between moving forward and slipping back.<br><br>Wise people everywhere agree that the antidote to the fear of failure is actually rather simple: <em>Don\u2019t walk away<\/em>.&nbsp;Stay in the chaos.&nbsp;Courage grows, even by tiny increments, every time we decide to confront our problems instead of trying to figure out how we might escape.<br><br>What the Bible\u2019s \u201cheroes\u201d learned is that as often as they stumbled and got things wrong, God always had their backs.<br><br>And what did they ultimately discover?<br><br>Failure is never final if our hope is anchored to Someone beyond ourselves.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To listen to today&#8217;s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Hope is life\u2019s extraordinary antidote for discouragement.\u00a0That doesn\u2019t mean that success always comes easily.\u00a0Winston Churchill was once asked what most prepared him to sustain his lonely fight against Adolph Hitler throughout the 1930\u2019s (when many British leaders saw no danger in the Nazi regime), and how he found the courage to rally&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/17\/facing-failure\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4353,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,205],"class_list":["post-4352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-failure","tag-fear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4354,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4352\/revisions\/4354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}