From Pastor Zeke Page 1 From the Desk of Pastor Zeke Failing Your Way to Success Are you successful? Would your friends, family, coworkers say you are successful? Most often, when you greet someone new the first question out of the box is: “What do you do?” This is a peculiar quandary… Are we as individuals so defined by what we do that it becomes the thing we are most known as? Is what we do and how good we do it the defining thing in our lives? I hope not for all of our benefit. In the book “Falling Upward” Father Richard Rohr perceptively writes: “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens; yet nothing in us wants to believe it.” I believe this is true. However, I want to live and act as this is true. In honesty, I really hate to fail. I’m just not too good at it. I brood, reflect, encourage anxiety to build, reflect more, and develop a strategy so that this failure will never happen again. I imagine many of you are similar to this. I have come to experience, personally and within community, that our greatest failures in life have the potential to shape, motivate, commission, and propel our lives radically toward betterment. Unfortunately, these can equally crush you as well. For those who endure and persevere, you will gain character, resolve, and confidence in who you are. Somewhere along the way, our cultures fixation on success at all costs have found its way into the theology of people of faith. This is where belief systems of reward and punishment, divine favor, works righteousness, and hierarchical faith have found root. From my first days as a person of faith, it has been the divine depth of God’s grace that has captivated my life and my heart. Grace is “accepting that you are accepted” (Peter Rollins) at its most basic. Accepting that God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it. When one lives out their faith in light of God’s grace, failure can be transformed into an “opportunity for growth”. Grace is the glue that holds us together when everything else falls apart. (Continued on page 2) Wesley UMC Newsletter May 2019
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