But here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. If God can do all that redemption in my life when other people fail me, can’t He do the same for someone else when I fail them?
I don’t mean that as an excuse. I mean it this way: When I have failed, I can receive forgiveness. I can get up and go on, without having to drag a big load of shame and guilt behind me for the rest of my life.
Forgiveness is here for me, too. My own mistakes and failure have taught me that.
Depth
Brennan Manning says this: “Even if we could live a life with no conflict, suffering or mistakes, it would be a shallow existence. The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.” (The Ragamuffin Gospel)
And we live with our failures, not broken and shut down and humiliated. We live with our failures, forgiven and trusting God, because He IS, and I am not, and He redeems even though I can’t.
I love The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, and in The Last Battle there’s this theme of “always more.” The stable is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The more you travel into the New Narnia, the more there is.
And I think that this is the experience we can have in failure. The more we open our hearts to God to receive forgiveness and redemption, the more we let Him be God, the more there is of Him for us to find.
We come to see that He is deep enough for everything—for us, and for the hurting people around us.
Community
“Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t. People who pretend have pretend relationships.” (Mike Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality)
The beauty of failure—especially a big, public failure like the one we had—is that it’s an opportunity for the pretending to end. Not just in the way we think about ourselves and in the way we relate to God, but in the way we connect to other people.
I will tell you, as one who knows, that failure feels like being thrown into the ocean in the middle of the night, and the ship keeps sailing without you.
But if you can breathe and float for a while, and trust the Love that never lets you go, eventually you will come ashore in a place where you can look into the eyes of another person and say, “I know you. You are my people.”
And that gift of true community is one of the best gifts of failure.
***
This article originally appeared at KayBruner.com. For more on Kay’s personal marriage struggles, check out her book As Soon As I Fell: A Memoir.
