As I look back on the summer I realize that I did not do half the things I wanted to do. I had plans aplenty and scads of schemes but in they are all still in the development stage. That’s not to say I didn’t get anything done or that all of my dreams or visions are unfinished; I did manage to do a few of the things I had seen myself doing; I just didn’t do all of them.
Go ahead, call me a failure if you like; I can live with that. I knew going into the summer that I would not achieve all of my goals. My eyes were too big for my appetite and I had planned too much. My imagined accomplishments were not at all in line with the reality of the limited time allotted to summer. So I was destined to fail, hoist by my own organizational petard, if you will.
Most of us are, if we are honest, natural born failures. Now don’t get me wrong; that’s not an insult or something to feel bad about. To fail doesn’t mean that we do nothing right or that we are completely unsuccessful. To fail means that we have tried and not entirely succeeded. It means that we have planned but not accomplished all. It means that we must settle for what we have achieved, concede when we have been defeated and admit when we have managed to really blow it and need to be forgiven.
The biggest reason that we are failures is that we fail to realize fully who and what we are. We are God created beings of incredible talent potential. Take a quick mental survey of all the amazing things human beings can do. When you consider the feats of engineering done throughout the world or the artistic achievements evident throughout Chatham, you realize that God accomplished a lot when He created us.
Now, you might well be thinking, “With all our amazing success in the world, how can you call us natural born failures?” Good question, and here’s the answer: most, if not all, our achievements are monuments to ourselves. We do what makes us feel good without considering the cost to others; we cover acres of farmland with high-rise apartments. We produce art that glorifies our own beauty rather than glorifying the one that created us.
That’s why we are natural born failures: too much of our lives are devoted to us rather than God, our creator. Our egos and our stomachs drive us more than our love of one another and the God who loved us first. In other words we fail right out of the starting gate; rather than directing ourselves to God and succeeding we turn towards ourselves and blow it. It’s that simple.
As natural born failures you might think that God would not care for us or turn away from us. You would be wrong: God loves us in spite of and because of our failings. God knows we could never be perfect because He gave us the choice to do as we please.
Of course, knowing that we would make the wrong choices, God planned for His success in our lives through Jesus, His son. Through Jesus, God makes up for our failures. Through Jesus, we are forgiven and restored. Through Jesus, God’s love is made perfect in us. We may be natural born failures, but that doesn’t stop God from loving us, and it shouldn’t stop us from loving God as best we can.
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