{"id":5231,"date":"2026-02-16T07:47:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T12:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5231"},"modified":"2026-02-16T07:47:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T12:47:07","slug":"coming-up-short","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/16\/coming-up-short\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming Up Short"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>
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The Winter Olympics of Milano-Cortina was supposed to yield the greatest harvest of American gold medals of the past three decades.
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Instead, many of America\u2019s made-for-TV superstars have experienced failure on an epic scale.
\u00a0
Lindsey Vonn crashed in the women\u2019s downhill and shattered her left leg. Mikaela Shiffrin, history\u2019s most accomplished skier, has been shut out twice in her efforts to reach the medal stand. Chloe Kim fell in the halfpipe, the event she has long dominated.
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Most astonishing of all, Ilia Malinin \u2013 dubbed the Quad God for his mastery of quadruple jumps that most skaters will never even attempt \u2013 fell twice, failed to complete basic moves, and finished an incomprehensible eighth. \u201cI blew it,\u201d he said as he departed the ice. Observers described last Friday\u2019s debacle as the most shocking turn of events in Olympic skating history.
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One of the reasons we savor Olympic accomplishments is that we can only shake our heads and say, \u201cI could never do that.\u201d
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Then, a few minutes later, an elite athlete unravels before the watching world \u2013 at which point we shake our heads and say, \u201cOn the other hand, I can definitely relate to that.<\/em>\u201d
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A great deal of life is failure.
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And how we handle coming up short \u2013 sometimes disastrously short \u2013 is essential to our growth as human beings.
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In his bestseller In Defense of a Liberal Education,<\/em> Fareed Zakaria notes a worrying trend in how colleges and universities evaluate potential students. He writes, “Admissions offices now prize nothing less than perfection.”\u00a0
\u00a0
Zakaria asked the leader of the admissions team at an Ivy League school, “Do you take in many kids who have failed in some significant way in high school?”\u00a0The director\u00a0candidly admitted that they didn’t.\u00a0His school\u00a0only targeted students with the best transcripts and highest SAT scores.

“I pointed out.” Zakaria continues,\u00a0“that how one responds to and recovers from failure is one of the most important characteristics of an individual, probably one that reveals more about his or her future success.”

The admissions director, a well-educated scholar, acknowledged Zakaria’s\u00a0point.\u00a0But if they took in kids who had failed in some major way, “the college would drop in its rankings and in its ‘win-loss’ ratio against other key schools (that is, the percentage of students who, when admitted to two schools, accept one over the other).”

In other words, if you\u2019re looking for an open door to an excellent education, you’d better not fail. Or even hint\u00a0that your life might have\u00a0been anything less than a beautiful and flawless journey.\u00a0\u00a0

And that is tragic \u2013 for the simple reason that failure, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes us.\u00a0
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And then remakes us<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0
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As Yoda reminds us in The Last Jedi,<\/em> “The greatest teacher, failure is.”\u00a0\u00a0
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We may be blessed with great DNA, great parents, and great opportunities, but our character\u00a0really turns on how we respond to\u00a0life’s inevitable moments of great pain and great disappointments.\u00a0Those who have faced up to such failures and become wiser and gentler are truly the cream of the crop. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

Significantly, the Bible turns out to be a library of failure stories.\u00a0\u00a0

Abraham failed to take seriously God’s promise\u00a0that his\u00a0descendants would one day become a great nation.\u00a0Jacob failed to treat his children fairly, thus sowing\u00a0murderous anger between them.\u00a0Moses failed in his first\u00a0attempt to rescue the Hebrews\u00a0from slavery in Egypt, thereby squandering 40 years of his life.\u00a0David failed miserably in his marriage(s) and his parenting.\u00a0Peter failed to stand beside his Master in his darkest hour, declaring three times that he had never even met the man.

Yet Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, and Peter are among the Bible’s greatest heroes.
\u00a0
“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,” writes the apostle Paul, who survived incredible mistakes early in his life, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).

God is the one who can transform some of our worst moments\u00a0into our greatest victories.
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Ilia Malinin\u2019s story now includes a brutally rough chapter.
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But that doesn\u2019t mean his story has to come to an end.
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Our stories aren\u2019t over, either \u2013 no matter what we have done or not done, whether this past weekend or many years ago.
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If we receive God\u2019s freely offered gifts of grace, forgiveness, and hope, failure doesn\u2019t get to have the last word.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0The Winter Olympics of Milano-Cortina was supposed to yield the greatest harvest of American gold medals of the past three decades.\u00a0Instead, many of America\u2019s made-for-TV superstars have experienced failure on an epic scale.\u00a0Lindsey Vonn crashed in the women\u2019s downhill and shattered her left leg. Mikaela Shiffrin, history\u2019s most accomplished skier, has been… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5232,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,18],"class_list":["post-5231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-failure","tag-hope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231","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=5231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5233,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5231\/revisions\/5233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}