My New Year’s resolution is to fail more. No, I don’t mean taking a quiz without studying with the hope of failing. No, this is not just senioritis. And yes, of course I think doing work well pleases God, but so does creativity, boldness, experimentation, growth and, I would argue, so does failure.
College should be, more than anywhere else, the place where failure is encouraged. Unfortunately, as I reflect on my college years, I spent most of my time trying to convince myself and others that I was smart, capable and talented. Being smart, capable and talented is great, but if that is our only goal, failure becomes our biggest enemy. Interestingly, the most significant periods of growth in my life have not been the times when I have felt capable. They have been the times when I felt way out of my comfort zone, where failure was a real possibility and sometimes a brutal reality. When I put myself in a situation where I could easily fail, that is when I had to face the reality of who I really am, and that is when I had to grow, as did my comfort zone.
I think at some level, we all know that when we fail, we learn more than when we succeed. I learned how to correctly spell Wednesday, not from doing it right, but after my seventh-grade theatre director laughed when I wrote “wednessday” on a post it-note. Maybe that is not the best example of supportive experiential learning, but I think the point still stands: We know we grow far more from trying and failing, yet we still avoid it at all costs. That is why I am making it a goal to fail. Maybe that is a little extreme. Well, good, I like extreme. When failure is just something we force ourselves to accept when it comes, we still fear it. When we anticipate it as a real possibility and are ready to embrace it, we also embrace the growth that comes with it.
Failure shows how human we are, and at times in Christianity, “human” becomes a bad word. Here at Northwestern, I think failure is the number one enemy. Which makes sense. No public relations team sits down to plan promotional material and decides “Hey, we should advertise our biggest mistakes.” Striving for Christian excellence is admirable. But when Christian excellence becomes synonymous with some measurable rate of “success,” I think we miss the point of the Gospel entirely. God let us be human. He became human himself in all our messy awkwardness. The Gospel is about Jesus’s life, not just his death. I do not know if we can say Jesus was fully human unless we recognize that he, at some level, must have failed. To be human is to fail. I’m not saying that Jesus sinned, because I think equating failure to sin is ridiculous. But did he try something that he was awful at? Did he say something that was misinterpreted and offend a friend? Was he clumsy? Was he bad at telling jokes? Our very humanness is inseparably intertwined with failure. We try, we fail, we grow, we change. There is something sacred about it. Maybe Christian excellence is more than just our class’s GPA average or the percentage of graduates with jobs within six months. Maybe Christian excellence is more about the process of growth than the results. Maybe the Gospel is not just about rejecting sin, but about accepting the beauty within what it means to be human.
So, during my final semester in college, I hope to have a record high number of awkward interactions in the Caf, humbling workouts in front of gym rats in mnvthe RSC, conversations with people I disagree with where I make a fool of myself, papers with poor grammar that I feel passionate about, odd talks with professors who terrified me as a freshman, slightly nauseating hub fries and for the glory of God, a wonderfully, sickeningly messy, fully human experience. Go fail well.
