Who errs and mends, to God himself commends.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A rooster’s crow pierced the heart of the frightened and derelict disciple. One glance at the Master’s expression, and all Peter could do was weep bitterly.
Yet Peter is not remembered as a man of tears and failure. Certainly he filled his quota of mistakes. Previously, his brief trek on the water turned into treading water, and later Paul would rebuke him publicly for his snub of the Hellenistic Christians. Still Peter stands in our minds as the rock — a venerated founder of the church.
Why? Because Peter learned to face failure. Failure wasn’t the end for Peter; it was merely one milestone. Other more significant monuments marked the greater course of his life, overshadowing the lesser markers of mistakes. He who tried big, blundered big, but he continued on. And we are all blessed because of it.
Biting the Bullet
Richard Kew, an Episcopal rector, discovered that failure wears a dread countenance. A couple of years ago he wrote autobiographically:
“Last week I resigned from parish ministry. My marriage is in trouble and my nerves have been in tatters. Less than a year ago I was considered a high flyer in my denomination, having held a series of highly responsible positions of leadership by the time I was in my mid-thirties.
“Now all that is gone. I have burned out. The succession of emotions I have experienced over the last couple of years has been devastating — depression, despair, disgust, anguish, panic, sadness — and all the time it has been increasingly impossible to put one foot in front of the other. Every time I stood in the pulpit or at the Communion table, I felt myself digging for spiritual and emotional resources that no longer were there. Like a thirsty man, week by week I would go to a dry well, hoping for a small puddle of water seeping in from somewhere.”
His attitude toward Sunday worship was the clue he failed to notice. “For as long as I can remember, I have dreaded Sundays. They became the symbol of the agony I was having with my work. People came because they wanted to hear what I had to say from God. I wanted to tell them, ‘I have nothing to give you; now it is your turn to feed me,’ but I didn’t.”
Preaching, which had once been his great delight, slowly became a nightmare, until he reached the point where he stood at the pulpit one Sunday thinking, I don’t believe a word I’m saying. Soon afterward, he found himself wondering whether God existed at all. Certainly if he does, he thought, he doesn’t appear too interested in me.
“Instead of correctly interpreting the danger signs, I kept on going. In order to stay where I was and to appear on top of things, I found myself pushing harder and harder. In due course, everything caught up with me, in the most excruciating manner. I discovered I was not on top of anything; everything was on top of me. By the time I started taking action to redeem the situation, my problems were already too big to be resolved.”
The problem? He continually overspent his emotional account. “I always felt myself to be stronger and more capable than I actually was,” Kew writes, “and I also wanted to prove something to myself, my peers, and the whole wide world. I deliberately took on tough assignments, and by and large succeeded.
“Prospective secular employers, after reading my résumé, have looked over their half-moon glasses and wondered how I found time to do it all. The answer: I stole the time from my family and myself.”
His creeping acedia, the hurry-up pace, the dread accompanying his work, his loss of confidence in the Master and message he represented — all should have put the brakes on his frenetic scramble before the eventual collapse of his marriage and career. Clearly something was amiss, but he continued to ignore the signals. Only when blaring sirens drowned out all else did he slow down to assess the situation. By then he had a first-class disaster on his hands.
The result? “By the time my wife and I sat down in marriage counseling, the backlog of unfinished business was too great. Tension had mounted to the point we decided we could not live under the same roof. I resigned my pastorate, moved into a rented room, and tried to put my life back together. There was not only the deep sense of failure my wife and I shared — along with mutual recrimination — but the church I served for a number of years became a source of anguished upset as they probed clumsily to place blame for the fiasco.”
Kew found himself without his occupation, his identity, his family, his possessions, his home, and — nearly — his faith. “I had been unable to say no,” he laments, “hungry for recognition and too eager to prove myself more capable than anyone else. We cannot reach beyond ourselves, but I spent years trying to do just that. The success was transitory, the fall devastating.”
Fortunately Kew didn’t remain in a hole, and he is now director of the U.S. office of The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. But his words pierce us when we’re apt to ignore the signs of an impending mistake: “I hope clergy will see the danger signs and realize when they are running out of steam. I was too stubborn to do anything about it at first. If this is you, too, then I urge you, for God’s sake and for the sake of those around you, to do something about it before it is too late. Parish ministry can be a killer, and a dead or neutralized pastor is no good to anybody.”
Where does recovery begin? As difficult as it seems to the one feverishly trying to stonewall his failings, the first step toward recovery is admitting the problem: “I have failed.” Kew couldn’t begin to conquer the failure-beast until he named it. To begin to recover, he, like all of us, needed to recognize his mistakes.
Recognizing Failure
In Where Is God When It Hurts? Philip Yancey wrote about a peculiar handicap of lepers: they feel no pain in the afflicted parts of their body. They can burn a leprous hand in the fire or have a toe gnawed off by a rat, and never feel a thing. A cut becomes abcessed or an injury critical because they have no sensation of pain. Much of the disfigurement of leprosy comes not from the disease but from the tragic side effect of painlessness. Pain, then, is a blessing.
One of the marks of a sociopathic personality is an inability to recognize one’s own error. The sociopath can lie, swindle, and abuse, and never really understand why everybody gets so worked up about it. Like the leper, bereft of the merciful capacity to feel pain, the sociopath injures himself and others and totally ignores it. He makes mistakes and goes on as if nothing happened.
Minor errors, when unattended, soon become gross infractions. Thus, the dawning pain of failure is, for those sensitive enough to experience it, a blessed protection. We should be glad we feel bad when we fail. It’s a vital safeguard for the healthy — one from which the sociopath never benefits.
What we do with that signal is another matter. Richard Kew at first ignored the pain and pressed on. What he needed to do was stop to recognize the source of that pain. Only then could he possibly have avoided turning his world inside out.
Claiming the Failure
Harold Englund of Garden Grove Community Church quips, “When I lay an egg, I autograph it and hold it up for all to see.” That’s not bad advice, for it accomplishes two objectives in one stroke.
First, it keeps him from waffling. How much more constructive to say “I’ve blown it!” than to hem and haw and cover his tracks. Admitting failure begins the healing process, a process that cannot commence during mental gymnastics to avoid the blame.
Earl Palmer of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, tells an anecdote about Karl Barth: “When Barth went back to Germany after World War II, he met theologian after theologian who said, ‘We have been through a demonic period with Adolf Hitler.’ Even non-Christians were saying, ‘What we’ve experienced was demonic.’ Everyone claimed, in effect, ‘The Devil was responsible.’ Barth said he yearned to hear someone say, ‘We sinned.’ He felt there wouldn’t be help until they could admit their own culpability.”
Had Richard Kew placed the blame outside himself, he would have delayed his recovery. Autographing that egg, claiming it as his own, was the initial hard but necessary step toward his recovery.
Second, holding it up for all to see is a masterful strategy. I don’t think I am alone in my great fear of mistakes: I don’t want to be discovered. Quiet little mistakes that nobody sees don’t terrorize my imagination like public blunders that can leave me dangling in the breeze. I urged them to increase the budget, and now we’re swimming in red ink. How soon till the inquisition? Or That new roof was my idea, but it leaks like a sieve. That’s going to come back to haunt me! The apprehension of being caught, getting stuck with the rap, is sometimes worse than the actual experience.
We disarm the opponent when we expose our own folly. One of the secrets of judo is to use the momentum of the attacker. You don’t block the punch; you go with it. It works with confessions as well. “Friends, I goofed. Last fall I urged you to increase the budget 35 percent against all signs to the contrary. I felt we could be stretched. We couldn’t. Now we have some hard decisions to make, and it’s my fault. What can I say? I was wrong.”
Now I’ve uncovered myself. I’m clean.
Interestingly, I’ve also found this process is usually safer. The shepherd-types in the congregation often keep the vultures away. If I expose my own folly, it’s hard for detractors to pounce on me. Certainly this cannot become a regular ploy. But on those occasions when I have goofed and I expose myself, there’s little left for my detractors to say.
It’s not only a beneficial practice, it’s right. When I’m at fault, I’m on far better moral footing to accept the blame rather than dodge it. People respect an honest admission of error, and even if I get some heat, I can get on with repairing the damage.
Dick Lincoln, pastor of Shandon Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina, interjects a word of caution, however. He believes pastors are often more sensitive to their mistakes than others are, and may be tempted to become compulsive confessors. “Many of the decisions we make are close calls. Some parts work out well, and others not so well. In many of these decisions, few people will ever think there has been a mistake without it being labeled as such. If I blunder in and tell them about the ‘big mistake’ I made, it may be news to them. It’s a good idea to stay positive, to the extent it doesn’t cloud the truth.”
There’s no use in sowing seeds of discontent where none would have grown on their own. A rule of thumb: Claim those obvious mistakes in the public domain. If you goofed, say so. But if a possible mistake is unclear, if it is not your fault, if it is a minor and unknown matter, then the less said, the better.
Richard Kew waited too long to claim his evident mistakes. They had mounted to such a point that the only apparent way out was to leave the ministry. However, even at this stage, the people in his church didn’t pounce on him when he admitted his mistakes. Kicking a guy who just admitted he was down is not much sport.
Confessing the Failure
When the mistake is sin, pragmatic considerations are shoved aside, and confession is in order. I may need to apologize to the trustees if I show up late and unprepared for a meeting, but if I misappropriate church funds for personal use, I have two parties to appease: the board whose trust I trampled and the God whose moral law I offended.
What are the particular steps to be taken when our mistakes are of the sinful kind? When I asked one pastor, he chuckled, “Quit. You can’t just sin slower!” No one can move beyond a sin that’s allowed to remain habitual. Robert Millen, when finally faced with the depth of his sin, gritted his teeth and left homosexual practice cold turkey. He’s celibate now, at a tremendous personal cost. When he lost everything and was alone, with only his faith and resolve to sustain him, he realized he still had to do what was right, not what was easy. He quit, and that quitting started him on the road to peace of mind.
Next, in the steps of adulterous King David who told God “You are justified when you judge” (Ps. 51:4), Robert had to confess — agree with God. He poured out his confession to God, and he bravely confessed to his family and his church, pulling no punches, shouldering full responsibility. His teenage son was crushed, and the confession neither saved his marriage nor retained his pastorate. It wasn’t intended as a magical balm to salve his difficulties. It was the right and only proper course to take, difficult as it was.
For Robert, turning from the practice of sin meant a drastic alteration of his life. “I find it easier to be completely celibate,” he confides, “than to be selectively celibate, so I’m not sure I could return to my wife even if she would take me back. It would open up deep reservoirs of longing I don’t think I could handle.”
He’s fighting the battle with his homosexual orientation on a daily basis, much like an alcoholic who takes one day at a time. “I’ve been celibate for months,” he tells me, “and I’m celibate today. I can’t promise about tomorrow. I wish I could, but I can’t. I know I want to be.” He must strategize to remain pure. He has altered his lifestyle, habits, and friends in his effort to turn from sinful practice, to repent, to live his life in a way pleasing to God. He has learned the lesson: When you flee from temptation, don’t leave a forwarding address.
Not all sins may be as life shattering as Robert’s, but each moral mistake demands repair. Many of the pieces are in God’s hands. To God we must go for confession of failure and forgiveness of sin.
The bottom line: I am accountable, and until I realize and state my accountability, I add to my mistake. But when I recognize, admit, and confess my error, I make it possible to learn and grow from it.
There are indeed wise ways to keep from making a bad situation worse, and to those we now turn.
Copyright ©1987 by Christianity Today
