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    Fail: What to Do When Things Go Wrong
    Fail: What to Do When Things Go Wrong
    Fail: What to Do When Things Go Wrong
    Ebook91 pages2 hours

    Fail: What to Do When Things Go Wrong

    By Matt Miofsky

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    About this ebook

    We all know the feeling. We take a leap, only to land flat on our face. Just when our plan appears to be perfect, it falls apart. Life’s failures and disappointments can make it difficult to move forward; how do we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off?

    Matt Miofsky examines the life of Jeremiah, whose failed pursuits are described in more detail and depth than any other prophet. Even though God set him apart to speak to the nation of Israel, Jeremiah’s attempts to fulfill his calling were met with ridicule, punishment, and suffering. But through it all, God never left his side.

    The story of “the weeping prophet” has much to teach us about trusting God during life’s most trying times.

    Additional components for a five-week study include a comprehensive Leader Guide and a DVD featuring author and pastor Matt Miofsky.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9781501847844
    Fail: What to Do When Things Go Wrong
    Author

    Matt Miofsky

    Matt Miofsky is the Lead Pastor of The Gathering United Methodist Church in Saint Louis, Missouri. Matt gained a degree in Advanced Math and played football at Washington University and then attended Candler School of Theology. Matt lives with his family in Saint Louis and has previously published two small group studies based on his sermon series, Happy? and Fail.

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      Book preview

      Fail - Matt Miofsky

      INTRODUCTION

      Early in my ministry, the headmaster of a local private school reached out to me. I’ll never forget what he said the first time we talked.

      Matt, I’m an atheist. But having said that, I’ve heard your name from several parents in my school. I would love to get together and talk.

      And so we did. Every few months, Tom Hoerr and I would connect to share what we were working on, what books we were reading, what leadership struggles we were working through. Early in our relationship, Tom told me he was writing a book. Naturally, I asked him what the book was about.

      Grit, he told me.

      It turns out that grit, a concept originally coined by psychologists and now fairly well known in the education field, refers to a person’s ability to persevere and overcome challenges to achieve long-term goals. Grit is based on the assumption that some of our best learning experiences actually happen through setbacks, disappointments, and failures.

      In the context of education, I remember Tom asking me, Where in your life did you ever learn how to fail or how to deal with failure?

      After thinking about the question, I answered, Sports. In sports, losing is part of the journey. You have to learn how to lose, how to grow from it, how to improve through it, and how to get back up and play another game.

      He smiled and explained that a growing number of educators believe that schools must do a better job of teaching kids how to fail. And so Tom began writing about how educators can actually teach kids how to fail, especially in a culture where we are so scared of talking about or admitting failure. How do we set up instructional environments for people to fail and then learn from it? Tom told me, Failure happens all the time. What makes you better is how you react to it.

      (By the way, Tom eventually did write that book; it is called The Formative Five: Fostering Grit, Empathy, and Other Success Skills Every Student Needs.)¹

      Tom’s idea sounds good until you try to implement it. What parents want to see their children fail? For that matter, think how frustrating it would be for any of us to learn that an assigned task never had any real chance of success—that it was assigned knowing full well that we would fail, with the purpose of teaching us how to fail well. Not many of us would feel great about that—for ourselves or for our kids.

      And yet, if we look back over our lives, we know that what my friend Tom says is true. Many of our greatest lessons in life are those we learned not when we succeeded but when we fell short. I know it’s true for me. I suspect it’s true for you as well.

      Learning how to fail is critical for our long-term success and growth. But if that’s true, then it also means something else is true: if we don’t learn how to fail well, then we won’t ever live up to our God-created potential. If we are scared to fail and therefore shy away from anything bold, then we will leave a lot on the field of life when we are done playing.

      I’ve seen this in other people and in myself. Some of us have not learned to respond well to frustration and failure. When that happens, we’re likely to choose paths that are less risky and less challenging, in the process often destining ourselves to lives of safety, predictability, and mediocrity. By contrast, people who learn to weather some of the harshest and most tragic disappointments in life often are prepared for lives of risk-taking boldness and adventure. When we learn how to fail, we learn how to live.

      So that’s the idea we’ll be wrestling with throughout this book—that our failures, setbacks, and disappointments have much to teach us, and God can use those lessons as seedbeds for our greatest growth. Far from being gloomy or pessimistic, a clear view of failure as a source of growth can be incredibly hopeful, even or especially for those of us currently going through hardships in our lives. What my friend Tom wanted to teach kids is something that I believe God wants to teach all of us.

      In this book, we’ll explore failure and the lessons we can learn from it. After all, failure is not an if proposition; it is a when proposition. If failure is not a possibility in any area of your life, chances are that you’re playing it too safe and not following God’s nudges. But if you’re following Christ, taking chances, living by faith, loving others, or following a call, then you’ll need to learn how to fail and fail well.

      So rather than shy away from failure as so many people do, we’re going to talk about it. We’re not going to be scared by our failures or embarrassed by them. Instead, we’re going to see them as occasions when God can teach us some of the greatest truths about life.

      Failure is a broad topic, so we’re going to focus by looking through the lens of Scripture. You might be surprised by just how flawed most people in the Bible really are. God, far from sugarcoating life or lifting up heroes who never stumble, consistently uses imperfect people, forming and shaping them as they try their best to follow God. None of them completely gets it right. All of them have moments of disappointment, and all of them learn to persevere in the midst of failure.

      Of all the Bible characters who experience setbacks and disappointments and yet continue to follow God, I always come back to one person. He was a prophet, and his name was Jeremiah. As I read about Jeremiah’s life, I became convinced that there isn’t a guy in Scripture who has more grit. His journey has lots to teach us about how we can respond when things go wrong in our lives.

      In the chapters that follow, we’ll study the Book of Jeremiah—not attempting an exhaustive survey but trying to see how God worked in and through Jeremiah’s failures, so we can see how God can also work through ours. Jeremiah will be like a conversation partner for us, a mentor who has experienced lots of hardships

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