Failure Our New Begin Spot (What have we learnt)

"I can't be quiet! I'm angry and bitter. I have to speak!" (Job 7:11, TEV)~

I’m sure that Job would at this point have felt something very close to failure, certainly rejection or abandonment. He had gone from living the high life, blessed by God with sons, daughters and being a man of substance, to having no family, no fortune and perhaps most irritating a lack of health. He would have been the modern day equivalent of a homeless man: problem for Job, he had three friends and a wife who felt his fall from grace badly.

But this is not meant to be a study on Job, although he would be a good candidate, this is about failure and how we deal with it. Failure is not going from a high life to being penniless, it is much simpler than that, failure is one response to having a project go bad.

It has been documented that Edison tried a thousand times to get the electric light to shine before one worked. If he had stopped trying at bulb number 998 then his idea would have failed.

Alexander Graeme Bell was on the point of giving away his telephonic idea when reportedly as the result of an accidental acid splash his assistant heard his pain on the other telephone and rushed to his aid. Had it not been for that accident then the phone might never have been marketed.

Can you imagine what our world would look like today if both these men had stopped short? The temptation is to suggest that it may have been a better place without them but they do serve a public and private function that we would be worse off, if we didn’t have them.

Success, that anti-thesis of failure, in these instances was the refusal to quit, the stubbornness to keep on trying when nothing seemed to be working. But failure is more than not succeeding, there is something more intrinsic to failure, which resonates within our being. This personal assessment of failure has the “why” question associated with it. Restated we say “I didn’t succeed why” ...  and then proceed to try to discover the reason why we failed, were failures.

Failures have that tone of recrimination about them, it doesn’t matter the size of the failure then we need a reason. We often see it as a personal shortcoming that needs to be hidden. How often when we are late for a meeting do we add up to the fact that we weren’t organized enough, instead, the traffic was terrible, or my office is a shambles today, or something just as innocent. The fact of the matter is that those excuses simply put an edge to the original cause of the problem.

It is usually better to try to do something and then if you succeed then you have achieved your aim, if you don’t then the opportunity exists to give it another go, and then again until ... success. We are no less a person to attempt something but not succeed, although out inner critic will always attempt to tell us different. Remember Job here is another grab from him three quarters of the way through the story "Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God's intimate friendship blessed my house." (Job 29:4, NIV).

His problem was that he rightly attributed his circumstance to God having withdrawn His blessing. Is there a lesson for all of us in this? Further are we the best ones to judge the reasons when something doesn’t work out.