I Wish I Knew How to Fail

Winning and losing are the twinned grades of our culture. Transactions of profit and loss are the medium of our living in the world. I think our belief in those transactions is the place where God is revealed, especially when we lose.

I am old, so I have “won” things. But I have “lost” far many more. This week I found out that I had (again) lost a bevy of architectural competition entries. I am regularly told that my writing does not fit a publisher’s needs. I do not get to work on projects that I know (I Just Know) would be great for me to devote my time to.

Life coaches make a living therapizing the losers (all of us) and telling them that the journey is the destination. That our rewards are in our passion. “It’s All Good.” I do not have cancer. I have the love of my life. We created healthy children. Buck up, Loser.

Losing is still Losing.

We win. We lose. I’m not sure what to do with my incapacities when they are revealed to have always been there, completely ignorant of my hopes.

But my hopes are also ignorant of my faith. I honestly do not feel that I am owed anything. I hope, but expect little — perhaps the residue of a privileged and brutal childhood where God was next to me amid the yelling. Perhaps it’s just how God made me. There is no reason, perspective — just coping. But somehow our culture is grounded in the basis that success is a graded achievement, not a gift. ‘Tis the season of grades: World Series, NFL/college/high school football, endless political polls, not to mention all the unending internet grading systems, Yelp, numbers of hits/friends/likes. Basing life on whether we get what we want or do not is a defining characteristic of our times.

“Are you tired of winning?” says the reporter to a grinning President. “WINNING!” says the addled actor Charlie Sheen. Vince Lombardi once reportedly opined, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” But for every win, there is a loss — the other side of the binary.

Twenty years ago, the Connecticut Lottery had an ad campaign based on the slogan “You can’t win if you don’t play!” I immediately responded in my mind that if I do not play, I cannot lose. Not playing in the public mosh pit is losing too, but you control that loss, so it is a choice not to lose. Cursing the darkness, or even simply accepting it may be the only guarantee you are safe. But if you live outside your home, have children, write things like this, then collapsing the world to be what you can control is, well, a silly fake.

So we, I, lose.

As a card-carrying Type A, control is simply assumed. And is simply impossible. When I lose all those competitions, when I see my weight on the scale, when I see that my children are not me, I am, literally, at a loss. And God is still there. Next to me.

You might think I could then be OK with all those losses, but I am not. It grates on me every time the break from hope just happens. I wish I learned to be at peace with losing, which hurts far more when I fail to do what my life’s mission is. Having lived a life of work and failure, the gift of losing is a hard-won truth that I have reluctantly learned. For every loss, there is a gain — even gains I wish I didn’t need to re-learn. Rinse and repeat, an unending cycle of pride and humility. Despite the insight a failure provides, losing still stings, still eats away at my aspirations to live beyond the sheer gift of the capabilities I have been given.

But even if I was fully “at fault,” God does not grade on a curve. The judgment he gives is grace, not a binary of wins and losses. Not a construction of reason, fear, desperate defensiveness against mortality. Because Jesus died. He lost. Some two thousand years ago He was murdered by us, even though he was given to us. We earn nothing, no matter how long and hard we work (and we do.) Work, effort, devotion might be ours to give, but the results of that — the Win or Loss outcome — is just given to us, too.