The Value of Failure

I've been reading a novel I picked up at the library recently. I find such joy in reading books and it feels like a special treat when one surprises you with a "truth nugget" right in the middle of an otherwise normal narrative. One of the characters is as nostalgic as I am. As she's processing her divorce, she comes to this conclusion. "It's funny what comes to mind when the worst possible thing happens. After Jim left, I thought my life was over. I had tried so hard, and Jim had stopped loving me anyway. But failing isn't proof that nothing matters or that we were fools to care. We fail even though things matter very much; it's the possibility of failure that makes them matter even more."*
Grief causes us to go back to what we lost and to reassess its value. Sometimes we overvalue what is was, living in the "glory days" and remembering everything from that time through rose-colored glasses. Other times, usually when we don't want to feel the pain of loss, we try to convince ourselves that what we had before was not as good as it really was. It allows us to squash the grief we feel so we can limp forward in search of something better.
I love what this character is saying. When something fails (loss is all failure of some kind: death is failure to live; divorce is failure to work things out, etc.) that does not diminish its value. In fact, we put more value in things that have the potential to fail. Relationships fail. And rather than saying that, in order to grieve that failure, we must carry it forever (rose-colored glasses) or devalue our experience (denial of pain) of it, she's saying that the very act of failure gives evidence of its meaning. 
This idea blows my mind. I often find myself so disappointed when something fails. As an achiever and a perfectionist, I try so hard to make my life (and the lives of those I care about, see: caretaking) work. And when things don't, it's so easy to want to reduce the value of that experience. The pain of loss is so great, and often I take on the responsibility for that failure regardless of the situation. So on top of grief, I add on a heaping measure of shame. It's so much easier to say that whatever failed was not worth the effort it required to continue. 
She goes on to say, "At fifty-three years old, I almost lost what I had somehow known from the time I was a small girl. I almost lost the knowledge that made my life work...the faith that made three decades of marriage possible and everything good that happened in those years: the family we had, the friends we made, the laughs we shared, the tears, the everything of it. At fifty-three, I almost forgot what Avis Briggs always knew. It all matters." 
She's saying that just because her marriage didn't last forever (and believe me, she's grieving that in a big way) does not mean that their thirty years together were a waste. Just because she's crying now, her years of laughter still happened and still matter. I find this idea so beautiful, so comforting and so, so true to my life. I want my experiences, both painful and beautiful, to have meaning. 
I have no control over how my life will go. I know everyone reading that last line will have a gut check reaction to that truth because we so desperately want that to not be true. We want our good behavior to control the future, that bad things won't happen to us if we behave ourselves, that we will not experience failure in the places that are the most vulnerable in our hearts if we just keep trying. We want to box in our world, our God, our choices, whatever it takes to know that everything will be okay. But the joy of this narrative, both in the novel I'm reading and in the life I'm living is that experiencing pain does not erase the experience of joy. 
As a black and white thinker, I often paint things with a broad brush. If the teen girl gets pregnant, then she shouldn't have had sex with that boy. No matter that she loved him, no matter that she wanted to, no matter that she learned something. She shouldn't have done it and now she's reaping the consequences of her choices. But this is life. The joy of sex and the fear of parenting. The safety of a thirty year marriage and the shock of divorce. The fun of loving your babies and the grief of them moving on. On and on it goes. We want to live in a way that we think we can foresee the consequences and learn to avoid them. Or that the foreseeable ones shouldn't hurt as much as they do. Of course, there are obvious high-risk choices and some of us are more prone to them than others. But there is no way to have complete foresight, no true security in life. 
While there is a lot of fear in acknowledging this, in some ways it comes as a relief to me. For one, it's true in what I've seen and experienced and when I stop denying my heart, I find peace. Two, it takes me off my high horse. It's a lot easier to judge people when you think you've got this life thing all sorted out. Three, it creates community. The lack of security we have in this life fosters dependence on each other in a way that is beautiful, sacred and ironically, security-giving. When we know we have hands to catch us, falling is not as devastating. Four, it takes the pressure off needing to figure everything out, being the one who always needs to be the giver. It levels the playing field, this acknowledging of our collective human experience. We have so much more in common with each other than the areas in which we differ. Five, if we know failure is part of life and therefore, inevitable, does that not make the victories more sweet? When things work out, isn't it almost an unexpected surprise? When we pick up a random novel off a shelf and we find hidden gems of truth, this is the sweetness of life. It's pure, unexpected and resonates with the truth in my heart. 
* For anyone who's interested, the novel is called We Are Called to Rise by Laura McBride.

"Lived in" Theology

I have many thoughts on theology and they're very different from what they used to be. But my life is very much "in process" and has been for some time. This July, it will be 3 years since Tim (and I) got fired from ministry. That was such a significant loss. If you've never been in professional ministry yourself, it can be hard to understand why this is so much more than a job loss. At the risk of sounding dramatic, we liken it to a divorce. Our church was where we spent the majority of our time. It was where we worked, where we learned, where we found support, where all our relationships came from, where we introduced our precious child to God, where we found purpose and identity. It was our life. Many people who attend church share some of these feelings. It's your "go to" place. Obviously, when you work there, this is taken to another level. And while it is a "family", for us, it was also our livelihood. Leaving your church, when you're as invested as we were, is very disorienting. Many people wanted to know "what happened" when we were fired, but to be honest, nothing happened. Like some divorces, it's a million little things that just don't add up to a marriage anymore. There was no major infraction. It's like, they fell out of love with us. There were things we were unhappy about in our relationship with the church too, and we're not at all claiming that we never made mistakes. But it's a painful reality to sit in that you can be dismissed from your "family." Your family can literally tell you that you no longer fit in it. After all this time, just writing those words brings tears to my eyes.

When we worked at church, our life was a lot more structured. We knew what we were about, as individuals and as a family. There were a lot of mission statements, tiers of leadership, committees. We knew where our life was headed. Our path was set before us. The weeks, months, years just flew by. We were so busy. There were things we felt God pulling us towards (reducing our consumer patterns, being present in our neighborhood, doing less, investing in deeper friendships) that just weren't possible in that environment. We were too distracted by the immediate tasks at hand and were trying to fulfill everyone's expectations of us. I haven't met a minister yet who didn't struggle with people-pleasing. There just wasn't enough space for growth in these areas. I think this is because when you get hired (marry your new church), they ask you where you stand on all sorts of theological issues. You get hired based on whether you and the church are compatible in these areas. The problem is, if you change at all and your church does not, you will eventually outgrow it and vice versa. So you either don't allow your theology to evolve or you try to drag the church with you. I'm not going to lie to you. Every single precious friend we know in ministry carries wounds from this reality. It's very painful. And no matter what anyone says, it most definitely is personal. I think what happens a lot, to quote an amazing Chumbawamba song (yes, I just dated myself), they just "get knocked down, but [they] get up again. You're never gonna keep [them] down..." You just keep going, keep praying, keep trying, keep crying, keep leaving. Until eventually, many of us just get too hurt or too tired to go on. Some of us barely escape with our faith, while others lose it entirely.

There was a new-found freedom to leaving ministry. We could hang out with whoever we wanted to! We had time to build a life for ourselves based on our personal values and needs. We could be in transparent, two-way relationships. We found out we weren't the problem or the solution. We were just regular people trying to make our way in the world and be decent to those around us doing the same thing. We got to ask the questions instead of having to give the answers. We realized we had a lot of unmet needs and a lot of theology to reevaluate. It was the first time in our lives that we were free to believe what we wanted, without feeling the weight of a bunch of other souls soaking up our influence. We gave ourselves permission to wrestle, to grieve and to change our minds, over and over again.

To be honest, we're not nearly done. But all of the things we wanted to be different in our lives are now. It's pretty amazing. And when the shit really hit the fan this year with the postpartum depression, we had the relationships we needed to keep us afloat. We could not have had that level of trauma in our old life. We would have had to stifle it or at least try to contain it. (Ever try to contain grief? Works great, right? Depression...sure, it goes away if you deny it long enough. Ha!) We probably would have lost the job then anyway. Churches don't like to employ openly messy people, especially if this includes their theology.

As a Christian, my theology is the lens through which I see the world, my life, myself. But there comes a point in your life when crazy, unreasonable shit happens. And the frame that you're putting around your life isn't big enough. Your life suddenly becomes an 11x14 and your frame is still an 8x10. What are your choices at that point? Either cut your life back down to an 8x10 (denial, shaming yourself, repressing your feelings, jumping into another situation without processing your loss) or you embrace the mess and get a bigger frame. I firmly believe in a God who's bigger than any frame I've used so far. He's not threatened by my broadening theology. And yes, I would love to pretend that I'm completely open now, living outside any proverbial box. But is that really a fair expectation for myself? I think we all have boxes regardless of our personal theology. Would it be cool to have none? Sure. But at this point, this perfectionist is just happy to know that mine is a bit bigger than it was before.