Spiritual Failure

For the second time in just over a week, fighter jets from the USS Harry S. Truman have fallen into the ocean, raising concerns about a pattern of mishaps aboard the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier operating in the Red Sea.

The latest incident occurred when an F/A-18F Super Hornet crashed into the Red Sea during a failed landing attempt. According to a U.S. official, the fighter jet experienced a "failed arrestment" while trying to land on the carrier, prompting both aviators to eject. They were quickly recovered with only minor injuries, and no additional personnel were harmed.

The Navy has launched an investigation into the cause of the failed landing. The mishap took place during routine flight operations.

Just eight days earlier, another F/A-18 fighter jet was lost from the same aircraft carrier. In that case, the plane was being towed in the hangar bay when it fell overboard, taking a tow tractor with it.

These incidents mark the third and fourth significant operational failures involving the Truman within the past year. In February, the carrier collided with a large merchant vessel near Port Said, Egypt. Prior to that, another F/A-18 was accidentally shot down by a ship in the Truman’s own strike group.

The USS Harry S. Truman has been stationed in the Red Sea as part of the U.S. Navy’s mission to protect commercial shipping lanes amid ongoing threats from Houthi rebels in Yemen.

These back-to-back aircraft losses are prompting closer scrutiny of operations aboard the Truman. The Navy has not yet indicated whether changes in procedures or readiness protocols will follow.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We must remain vigilant and attentive, individually and as a church body, lest through carelessness we fall into sin, which leads to destruction. Through teamwork and communication, we can protect our communities by guarding against calamity.

The Silver Bridge, officially named the Point Pleasant Bridge but known for its silver aluminum paint, opened on May 30, 1928, with great anticipation. Advertised as a groundbreaking cantilever design demanding “worldwide attention.” On its inaugural day, an estimated 10,000 people crossed the bridge, eager to be part of history.

But on December 15, 1967, the bridge collapsed. Eyewitnesses described the collapse as a slithering, buckling chain reaction, claiming dozens of cars and at least three trucks, resulting in the loss of 46 lives.

Unlike traditional suspension bridges like San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, which use woven-wire cables, the Silver Bridge was suspended from heat-treated steel eyebar chains resembling elongated links of a bicycle chain. A Popular Mechanics article summarizes the design flaw and its consequences:

When National Transportation Safety Board investigators recovered the wreckage, much of what they found was covered in rust. But they homed in on one small piece where the rust ran much deeper, the metal far more corroded: a single eyebar had snapped in two. It was as though a crack had developed over time, a slow corrosive fissure. The initial crack was barely one-quarter-inch long. But once it formed, all it could do was grow. Investigators came to understand that this single, tiny flaw destroyed the entire bridge.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The same is true in the spiritual life of the Christian. One small flaw, a little yielding to temptation, over time can cause the downfall of a person or a ministry.

It’s ironic that Grace Community Church, pastored by John MacArthur, is located in Sun Valley, California, because its leadership seems committed to keeping certain details hidden from light.

Christianity Today published a story in February about the struggles Hohn Cho had with getting people in his church to admit fault and correct an injustice. Cho is an attorney, and had been an elder at GCC. A year ago, he and several other elders were tasked with investigating claims of spousal abuse from a woman in the church’s care. What he discovered was that she’d been rebuked by elders for failing to reconcile with her husband, but later the husband was imprisoned for child molestation and abuse, vindicating her claims.

Cho says he repeatedly asked church officials to privately apologize and make things right, but they refused. He says Pastor John MacArthur himself told him to “forget it,” and Cho was eventually pressured into resigning from the board. Even after his resignation, Cho was contacted by numerous other women from GCC who’d been given similar counsel to endure abuse from their husbands. Ultimately, he concluded that he just could not forget it.

Cho wrote in a report to the elder board, “I genuinely believe it would be wrong to do nothing. At the end of the day, I know what I know. I cannot ‘un-know’ it, and I am in fact accountable before God for this knowledge.”

Cho told reporters at CT:

They sided with a child abuser, who turned out to be a child molester, over a mother desperately trying to protect her three innocent young children. And that was and is flatly wrong, and needs to be made right. Numerous elders have admitted in various private conversations that “mistakes were made” and that they would make a different decision today knowing what they know now. But those admissions mean you need to make it right with the person you wronged; that is utterly basic Christianity.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Abuse; Church Discipline; Failure, Spiritual - We can't claim to stand for the truth if we won't tell the truth when it's inconvenient to do so.

Passengers on an Emirates flight bound for Auckland, New Zealand that left Dubai one Friday morning ended up landing back at the same airport where it took off a little more than 13 hours later.

Flight EK448 departed at 10:30 a.m. local time but the pilot turned around nearly halfway into the almost 9,000-mile journey, landing back in Dubai just after midnight Saturday, according to FlightAware.

Auckland Airport was forced to close due to severe flooding. The airport statement said, "Auckland Airport has been assessing the damage to our international terminal and unfortunately determined that no international flights can operate today. We know this is extremely frustrating but the safety of passengers is our top priority."

Emirates said in a statement, "We regret the inconvenience caused to customers. Emirates will continue to monitor the situation in Auckland and issue updates where required."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Have you ever started on a long trip only to experience one complication after another only to find yourself right back where you started? In that case, you might begin to understand the frustration of the Israelites, who through disobedience, had to turn away in sight of the Promised Land and spend 40 years going around in circles in the desert before they returned to where they had started on the border of the Promised Land.

In the early hours of June 24, 2021, part of a slab from a high-rise condo building in Surfside, Florida dropped into the parking garage below. Within minutes, the east wing of the 13-story tower collapsed, killing 98 people in a disaster without modern precedent in the US.

Designed in the late 1970s, the 136-unit Champlain Towers South was completed in 1981 and marketed as luxury living. Officials are still investigating why the tower fell. Engineers point to some key decisions during construction, that while legal at the time, compromised the buildings foundation and integrity.

For instance, a Wall Street Journal report concluded:

[The original builders] skipped waterproofing in areas where saltwater could seep into concrete, the available evidence indicates. They put the building’s structural slabs on thin columns without the support of beams in some places. They installed too few of the special heavy walls that help keep buildings from toppling, engineers say, features that could have limited the extent of the collapse. And they appeared to have put too little concrete over rebar in some places and not enough rebar in others, design plans and photos of the rubble indicate.

Tragically, the construction flaws could have been repaired. The report continued:

Engineers say some issues would have been fixable, had the property’s condo board done more extensive repairs sooner. By 1996, the slab started showing cracks, and pieces of concrete had fallen off the garage ceiling, unusual so soon after construction. Workers patched cracks and waterproofed the pool deck, but that too eventually failed.

But the condo board failed to act. Roof work began weeks before the collapse, but repairs to the steel-reinforced concrete hadn’t yet started.

Mistakes are easily made and it’s often too late to rectify the situation by the time someone notices. That was the case with Spain’s supposedly state-of-the-art submarine the S-81 Isaac Peral. The submarine was commissioned in 2013 as one of four new submarines for the Spanish Navy, but there’s just one problem with its modern design. Once it’s submerged the S-81 Isaac Peral may never be able to resurface again.

This is because a miraculously unnoticed flaw in its design means that the ship is around 75 to 100 tons overweight. Which means Spain essentially invested in a submarine which can only move in one direction--down. The mistake is said to be the result of a pesky decimal point placed in the wrong place during calculations. And it’s a single dot which can cost an extra $9.7 million per meter of the hull, which has to be extended to regain its balance.

Considering $680 million has already been invested in this single ship as part of a total $3 billion for all four subs, this is hardly a (mistake) which can be brushed under the rug. It took an additional seven years to repair and the submarine finally joined the Spanish fleet in May 2021.

You can view the clip here (8 min 52 sec – 10 min 03 sec).

Japanese Marathon Runner Shizo Kanakuri competed in the domestic qualifying trials for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Kanakuri set a marathon world record and was selected as one of the only two athletes that Japan could afford to send to the event that year.

However, Kanakuri shockingly disappeared during the 1912 Olympic marathon race. He had had a rough 18-day-long trip to Stockholm, first by ship and then by train all through the Trans-Siberian Railway, and needed five days to recover for the race. Kanakuri, weakened by the long journey from Japan, lost consciousness midway through the race, and was cared for by a local family. Being embarrassed from his "failure" he returned to Japan without notifying race officials.

Swedish authorities considered him missing for 50 years before discovering that he was living in Japan. In 1967, he was offered the opportunity to complete his run. He accepted and completed the marathon in 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds, remarking, "It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren."

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible is full of stories of people who quit, but later, with God’s help, finished the race. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness before God renewed his call. Peter denied Christ, went back to fishing, but Jesus restored him. The list continues with John Mark, Sampson, and many others who eventually finished the race.

Peter Townshend is a singer, songwriter, and co-founder and leader of the rock band The Who. For over 50 years the band has been widely considered as one of the most influential and important rock bands of all time, selling over 100 million records worldwide. In an interview in The New York Times on his life and accomplishments, Townshend is honest about the meaning, or lack of, of his life’s work and the work of other notable rock musicians:

The massive question was: Who are we? What is our function? What is our worth? Are we disenfranchised, or are we able to take society over and guide it? Are we against the establishment? Are we being used by it? Are we artists, or are we entertainers?

Townshend admits that rock music has provided no substantial answers to the needs and questions of recent generations:

Rock ’n’ roll was a celebration of congregation. A celebration of irresponsibility. But we don’t have the brains to answer the question of what it was that rock ’n’ roll tried to start and has failed to finish.

What we were hoping to do was to create a system by which we gathered in order to hear music that in some way served the spiritual needs of the audience. It didn’t work out that way. We abandoned our parents’ church, and we haven’t replaced it with anything solid and substantial. But I do still believe in it. I do believe, for example, that if I were to go to an Ariana Grande concert — this iconic girl who … rose up after the massacre at her concert in Manchester with dignity and beauty — that I would feel something of that earlier positivity and sense of community.

The last thing a police officer trying to chase down a suspect in a high-speed pursuit needs to see is a warning that their patrol car is running low on gas—or on battery juice. But that’s how it went down one night in Fremont, California. The police officer pursuing a suspect while driving the department’s Tesla Model S patrol car noticed it was running out of battery power.

The pursuit of a “felony vehicle” started in Fremont and reached peak speeds of about 120 miles per hour on the highway. The officer driving the Tesla radioed in to dispatch that he might not be able to continue the chase he was leading. Officer Jesse Hartman said, “I am down to six miles of battery on the Tesla so I may lose it here in a sec.”

However, shortly after Hartman called, the person the police were chasing began driving on the shoulder of the highway as traffic was thickening. This prompted police to call off the chase at that moment for safety. The vehicle being chased was found a short time later after it crashed into bushes, but the driver had fled the scene and was not found. Officer Hartman eventually found a charger in San Jose to juice up his car.

A police department spokesperson said, “We have no written policy regarding charging, but the general guideline is that it should at least be half full at the beginning of the shift.” Apparently, the Tesla had not been recharged after the previous shift before Hartman took it out, so the battery level was lower than it should have been. A spokesperson couldn’t provide details on why it wasn’t charged.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Endurance; Holy Spirit; Power; Spiritual Warfare: Christians may also be running on empty unless they connect daily to the power of the Spirit. Only then will they have endurance in the struggle against temptation and the ability to do God’s will.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells, but in this story the main character does not travel through time or fight aliens as in Well's The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds. Rather, the protagonist finds himself shipwrecked on a mysterious tropical island under the iron control of Dr. Moreau. The brilliant scientist has created monstrous human-animals, giving wolves, pigs, bulls, and other creatures the rudiments of human appearance, personality, and abilities; yet, at heart they are still animals. Moreau keeps them in line through constant repetition of "the Law," a long series of commands chanted daily:

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?'

Does the Law work? Can it curb animal instinct? Yes and no. It restrains them during the day, but at night the animal nature rises. The narrator observes that "the Law … battled in their minds with the deep seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever breaking."

Possible Preaching Angles: Wells was not a theologian, but he could have been commenting on Romans 7, "We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual … . When I want to do good, evil is right there with me … . . I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against" God's law.

Timothy Keller writes: Christmas is about receiving presents, but consider how challenging it is to receive certain kinds of gifts. Some gifts by their very nature make you swallow your pride. Imagine opening a present on Christmas morning from a friend … and it's a dieting book. Then you take off another ribbon and wrapper and you find it is another book from another friend, Overcoming Selfishness. If you say to them "Thank you so much," you are in a sense admitting, "For indeed I am [overweight] and obnoxious."

In other words, some gifts are hard to receive, because to do so is to admit you have flaws and weaknesses and you need help. Perhaps on some occasion you had a friend who figured out you were in financial trouble and came to you and offered a large sum of money to get you out of your predicament. If that has ever happened to you, you probably found that to receive the gift meant swallowing your pride.

There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do so. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.

The 24/7 Wall St. blog reviewed some of the greatest product launch blunders in recent times, including Google Glass, Burger King's Satisfries, the New Coke, and Windows Vista. Hindsight is 20/20, but many of these product gaffes were the result of a company losing focus on what they do best.

For instance, consider the Colgate Kitchen Entrée line (yep, the toothpaste people) first introduced in 1982. For some reason Americans didn't associate pre-prepared frozen meals with the name Colgate. Then there was Harley-Davidson's unfocused ventures into cologne, wine coolers, and aftershaves. They all bombed. In 1979 Clairol came out with Touch of Yogurt Shampoo, which caused confusion as some people started eating their shampoo for breakfast. Or consider PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay's 2005 foray into the lip balm industry. According to 24/7 Wall Street, "While Cheetos has been a popular snack for more than six decades, Cheetos-flavored lip balm failed to catch on with consumers." You think?

The NPR radio show "This American Life" featured a story about a French comedian named Gad Elmaleh, probably the most famous stand-up comedian in France. He performs in huge arenas and gets mobbed everywhere by fans and paparazzi. But about a year ago, Gad embarked on a strange quest. He decided to try making it as a comic in America in English. This is an incredibly difficult and totally unnecessary thing for anybody to try to do. In France, everybody knows Gad Elmaleh. It was going great for him, but instead he gave all that up to start again at the bottom, doing small clubs and venues. He had to reinvent how he does his whole job. And he was struggling, and sometimes his acts completely bombed.

So a reporter turned to four famous American comedians and asked them to watch a video of a 15-minute set Gad did at the Comedy Cellar. They all agreed he's a pro, but that he has a long way to go to make it in America. Could he be a great comedian in America? Here's how the reporter summarized his findings about Gad's chances for success in America:

The comedians I talked to were adamant. For Gad to come up with the kind of material he's going to need to be great in America—the personal stuff, the stuff he really cares about—the only way to develop that is to do painful sets on stage where he tries out all kinds of stuff and lets himself bomb. In France, he doesn't do that. And Gad told me it goes against all his instincts—against 22 years of training—but he's going to have to override that instinct. He's going to have to embrace bombing, learn to fail at comedy at a whole new level, if he's going to succeed here. It's a concept that's totally foreign to him.

Possible Preaching Angles: The advice to "fail at a whole new level" and to "embrace bombing" could apply to so many important areas of the Christian life—service, mission, ministry, preaching, volunteering, the use of spiritual gifts, etc.

There is a Japanese word, kintsukuroi, that means "golden repair." It is the art of restoring broken pottery with gold so the fractures are literally illuminated—a kind of physical expression of its spirit. As a philosophy, kintsukuroi celebrates imperfection as an integral part of the story, not something to be disguised. The artists believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

In kintsukuroi, the true life of an object (or a person) begins the moment it breaks and reveals that it is vulnerable. The gap between once pristine appearance and its visible imperfection deepens its appeal.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Christ, power and grace of—Jesus is the ultimate Kintsukuroi artist. He takes our broken lives and makes them new. (2) Suffering—We probably shouldn't take this idea of beautiful brokenness as a symbol of how suffering makes us better. In the face of serious life damage, some tragedies are not "for the better" but are just that: tragedies, for the worse, which we would have been better off without. But kintsukuroi nevertheless remains a wonderful illustration for the Christian life, which holds symbols of both life and death in one ruddy old jug.

We all have failures in our careers. But usually we keep quiet about it. Not this Princeton professor, who recently shared his CV of failures on Twitter for the world to see. It includes sections titled "Degree programs I did not get into," "Research funding I did not get" and "Paper rejections from academic journals."

Why did he do it? "Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me," Princeton assistant professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer wrote on the CV.

Projecting only success and never recognizing failure has damaging effects, Haushofer wrote. So he decided to do something about it. "[People] are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective," he said. But here's what Haushofer called his "meta-failure": "This darn CV of Failures," he wrote, "has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Though we often fail, we can rise up again because of God's forgiveness; (2) God will lift up all those who humble themselves, but the proud he rejects

The Internet is full of videos of clumsy people doing clumsy things. Some are in high school, others are grown adults, but have you ever seen a video of a clumsy astronaut? NASA has. Reports show that experts studied hours of lunar footage from the 1970s in an effort to learn more about the effects of moon gravity on humans. Now if the thought of NASA engineers sitting around watching astronauts bounce and twirl around on the moon doesn't provide enough humor, hearing the engineers' astute observations might: "A preliminary analysis," one report reads, "suggested that loss of traction on loose soil caused crewmen to slip and fall."

Possible Preaching Angle:

One might wonder if that's how God sometimes feels as he watches us continually stumble and fall: it may be hard to watch, but it's the only way we'll ever learn how to stand in this strange world.

The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is home to one of the most fascinating museums on the planet. The facility run by GfK Custom Research goes under the informal name of the "Museum of Failed Products." At first sight, the shelves and aisles look just like a supermarket—except there's only one of each item. And you won't find these items in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them.

This is consumer capitalism's graveyard. It's the only place on the planet where you'll find Clairol's A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette's equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs; to self-heating soup cans that had a tendency to explode in customers' faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like tiny packages of crack cocaine. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs—pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car—go to die.

If the museum has a central message, it's that failure isn't a rarity; it's the norm. For every insanely successful product such as the iPhone or the Big Mac, there's a whole host of ideas that only a mother could truly love. According to some estimates, the failure rate for new products is as high as 90 percent.

Given the ubiquity of failure, business expert Matt Symonds advises that we should help people "fail, fail again, fail better" rather than "filling [people's] heads with the unrealistic notions of winning every time."

On August 31, 2002, Phil Brabbs, a placekicker with the University of Michigan, lined up for the most important field goal attempt in his career. With five seconds left on the clock and his team trailing the Washington Huskies 29-28, Brabbs entered the game to try a 44-yard field goal. About 100,000 Michigan fans had stayed to watch.

Up to this point in the game, Brabbs wasn't having a good day. His first field goal attempt sailedwide left. In the second quarter he missed again. At halftime Brabbs was booed by the sellout crowd as he jogged to the locker room. Before the third quarter he missed every one one of his warm-ups, all to the left. As a result, coaches benched Brabbs.

But after the backup kicker also missed a crucial field goal, Brabbs had another chance for redemption. As the time expired on the clock, his 44-yard kick flew between the uprights, giving Michigan a 31-29 win. A hundred teammates mobbed Brabbs while the fans cheered him. "I could have died right there," Brabbs said, "and I'd have died happy. I was like a presidential candidate." Even to this day, his game-winning field goal is simply called "The Kick."

But soon after "The Kick," a major injury sidelined Brabbs. He quit the team, graduated with a degree in engineering, landed a job with an IT company, married his college sweetheart, and had three children. But ten years later, in the summer of 2012, Brabbs, a committed Christian, was asked to deliver the commencement address at Frankenmuth High. He knew everyone was expecting him to mention "The Kick," but instead Brabbs looked at the students and said, "Be a failure. It's the misses that propel you forward [in life.]"

In a personal blog post, Brabbs expanded on that message:

Ten years later…. I am now thankful for the misses, because to this day, they are helping guide me through some of life's toughest challenges … So let's raise our glasses to the many misses we have in life, whether missed field goals, snaps that got away from you, or an occasional botched hold. Those dark moments may just be the predecessor of a really great moment.