Isaiah 40:29-31 (NIV)
He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Hebrews 12:11
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Coco Chanel
Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.
I played Little League baseball when I was a kid. Back then, it was an opportunity to learn the game infield and out. There was no pressure to win a televised national championship, just the occasional argument between parents who wanted their kids to succeed.
Over the few years I played baseball in my little Midwest cornfield town of DeKalb, Illinois, I played every position on the field. Except for Pitcher. They did put me on the mound once. I threw the ball, it went way outside, beaned the coach in the head, and that was the end of my pitching career. I spent some time in the Right Field Gulag after that.
Even that short experience taught me something, though. While each position is unique, one rule holds for them all: Go for it with the intention to absolutely smash it.
It’s not merely a matter of doing your best, especially if it’s something you’ve never done before. It’s more an attitude of fearless curiosity. Want to learn to cook? Throw some stuff in a skillet and see what happens. You might create the most savory dish you’ve ever tasted. If not, try something different next time. Keep what works, toss what didn’t, and try again.
Just go for it. Jump for the fly ball. Put your body in front of the guy trying to steal a base, swing at everything that could be a strike. Throw a lousy pitch. Sometimes, you will succeed in unimaginable ways. Often, you’ll whiff it and miss by a light year. Either way, you took the big swing. You went for the big play. It’s that attempt that’s important because, without it, there’s little chance of connecting.
The entrepreneur Jay Samit once said that “There is a huge difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn’t work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. True success comes from failing repeatedly and as quickly as possible, before your cash or your willpower runs out.”
Think about something you love to do—perhaps playing the piano, a sport, creating art, reading, bird watching,—any activity that pleases you. Now, remember when you first started to learn that activity? Your skills were likely a bit rough at first.. None of us are pros at anything the first time we try it.
I remember playing piano scales for hours and continually messing up. But practicing the scales over and over allowed me to play them more proficiently. I learned the correct way to move my hands, which fingers needed to hit which notes in what order to fly up and down the keys smoothly, and that took years. Even after all that practice, I still can’t play a Gb-minor scale very well, and I make mistakes when I play. We all make mistakes when we go for it because nobody’s perfect. If we were, the human experience would be lost.
If we consider ourselves more than mere subjects to a cosmic overlord, then our connectedness with God isn’t about perfection. Nothing in the universe—observable or otherwise—is perfect. Instead, our faith encourages us to progress through experimentation. God goes for it in a cosmic way and lets the universe play out. By the way, we can go for it even if we’re uncomfortable with bold decisions, change, and risk. We are all part of the energetic movement of God. There is beauty in the diversity of every role, personality, skill and talent—developing or accomplished—that forms God’s realm.
Consider the diversity of life on this planet alone—life that developed through evolution, nature’s way of learning new things through biochemistry. Nature’s way of going for it.
Being human requires experiencing the full spectrum of life, and that cannot happen if we cloister ourselves away and never try anything new, because we’re afraid of failure. I suggest that not to fail is not to be human. Humanity requiresjoy and pain, laughter and sorrow, success and, well, not failure, but not-so-successful, yet informative, events that we used to call failures but can’t any longer because now we understand we never really fail unless we just outright give up, right?
Of course, sometimes life goes horribly awry through no fault of our own. Pandemics occur. Loved one’s lives are suddenly snatched away. Global events may cause us to lose our source of income, shelter, and food. When the world breaks, it’s not time to retreat into our caves, it’s time to move forward boldly.
When the world—and we—are most broken, we must vigorously take that big swing. There is usually little progress, no change, unless we are willing to try something different unabashedly. Might we fail? The odds are yes, we will! ! But that cannot ever stop us from trying. Through failed attempts, our wisdom evolves.
It’s important to note that part of perseverance is learning from the things we try that don’t work. If we’re learning about brick walls, for example, we only need to run head-first into it and fall backward on our butts a couple of times to realize we either need to go around, over or under the wall, because going through isn’t going to work. Unless we invent explosives, another good option. Either way, we keep trying, and trying leads to new ideas, inventions, even ways of being together in society.
Keep trying. There is always a way.
Constantly trying is hard, though. It’s easy to lose confidence and begin to think that whatever you’re seeking is never going to work, especially if you’re someone like Tesla or Adam Smith or Jesus, with radically new ideas. Yet, perseverance pays off. Somewhere deep inside, after the 100th time your experimental lightbulb has burned out, you find the will to try one more time, and once more after that, until after 1000 once mores, your bulb stays lit.
At Intersect last week, someone asked how we’re supposed to find that sort of resilience, how we “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again,” as the classic jazz tune suggests. How do we motivate ourselves to practice enough that we’re confident to swing and miss, sometimes over and over again? I didn’t have an answer other than sheer force of will or God’s grace.
But it occurs to me that starting over shouldn’t be that difficult. We’ve all been knocked-down once or twice in our lives, unfortunately. Recovering is something with which we all have plenty of practice. From the wealthiest, most comfortable person in the world to the poorest, most Job-like of us, everyone has had moments in their lives when they’ve had to stand against a raging storm, either physical or social, and adjust what they were doing in response.
For some of us, dusting off and starting again is made more difficult by uncooperative, racist, and caste-based systems. Yet, we find encouragement in God, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, and each other.
Maybe it would be useful for us to start thinking of one another as coaches and teachers. I have to admit that since the quarantine, I haven’t been practicing scales or playing as much. So the other day, I sat down to do some rudiments—scales, arpeggios—the basics. Whoo-boy, I was terrible! And all I could hear in my head was my teacher going “No! Start again! No! Start again!”
Proficiency isn’t achieved by mindlessly plunging on after you mess up, but by learning from our mistakes and starting again. If you’re three notes into a scale and you make a mistake, start again. Halfway through the second octave, and you miss a note? Start again from the beginning. 5, 6, 7, 8…
Before you know it, practicing has prepared you for something new—to go for it, to transpose everything you’ve learned to a new key, where you’re prepared to mess up, dust off, and start all over again.
Amen.
Question: What is calling to you as a “go for it” opportunity in moving forward with God?
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