Falter vs Failure
by Jamie Steach
Confession time! I learned a couple years ago that I am actually a very fearful person. Now, many of us have very random, little fears that we deal with like spiders, bugs, snakes, heights, etc, but I have none of those fears. Consequently I never considered myself to be a fearful person, because there really weren’t tangible things I was ever afraid of. Maybe black widows, but that’s because they could kill you. Anyway, back to the point. I never thought of myself as a fearful person, until I got rejected from medical school. This simple event derailed the whole plan I had made for my life post-college, and I had a lot of processing to do as I figured out what to do next. It was a time and place in my life where I really had no clear direction for moving forward, and no obligations to fulfill either. If you’ve ever been in that place where you have no idea what to do next with your life, then you will know the dominant emotion that likes to rear its head: fear. The more my head began to swirl with doubts and questions and uncertainty, the more I realized I was choosing a lens of fear instead of a lens of faith. I tend to lead with logic and reason instead of emotions, and because of this I wanted an action to confront the fear I was feeling. I wanted to build what I knew so that I could ground myself rationally and sort of take the fear out of fear, or take its power away through reason. I knew already that faith and fear are opposites, and that faith comes from the Word of God (Romans 10:17). So I chose the only logical action I could think of, which was to do an in-depth study of fear in the Bible. I won’t go all into that study in today’s article, but what I do want to talk about is one idea I realized I was believing and the scripture for me that forced me to change my perspective.
Before we get into that, however, I want to pose a question: what is failure? What does it mean to fail, and why are we so afraid of it? If you do a Google search, the first definition for failure is “lack of success”, and the second is “the omission of expected or required action”. Failure is typically seen negatively in our culture today, and to believe that a person is a failure is basically to believe they will amount to nothing. However, as we look at this concept of failure, I want to pose some alternative questions: Whose definition of success are we looking at? If failure is simply a lack of success, what does it mean to be successful? Whose expectation is it that determines what is expected or required? Whose requirements are we measuring when we talk about failure? I think a lot of times we let our culture, our families, or what we’ve seen in other people be the voice of what is success and what is expected. That voice produces ideas like if you don’t have a good GPA, you’re a failure. If you aren’t good at a sport, you’re a failure. If you aren’t making lots of money, you’re a failure. If your business isn’t wildly successful, you’re a failure. If you work a minimum wage job your whole life, you’re a failure. And the list goes on. But what if that isn’t the right lens to look at life through? What if there’s something other than the voice of society that’s been pushed on us?
As I processed things and discovered my fears after being rejected, I realized one big theme was standing out that I needed to address, and in large part it was due to the lens I was using. I’ll get to this theme in a minute, but first, let’s talk about how I got there. After the rejection email, my immediate thoughts went to damage control. I didn’t really let myself be disappointed because I was afraid of people’s reactions, and instead I went right into planning mode. I was living in Pullman and it was February, so the first call I made was to arrange my living situation for the coming year. I hadn’t even told anyone about the rejection yet, I just called my future roommate to say “Hey I didn’t get into school so do you want to plan on living together next year?”. I’m not even joking. The next thing, which proved much more challenging, was to address the weak areas of my application. With medical school, there are a lot of components to a successful application. I had the grades and test scores to get in, and I even had the leadership experience, but there was specific experience in a medical office and with underserved communities that I was lacking, and this was expected in a successful application. I had committed to applying twice to school, knowing that in many cases people don’t get accepted on the first try, so I had to make sure my application was different and stronger the second time. I knew I needed more experience, and I knew that if I wasn’t able to get it, then I shouldn’t expect a failed application that hadn’t changed to work the second time. This was where things got hard. I made follow up calls to many local clinics that I had contacted earlier looking to gain hours of experience, but none of them allowed me to move forward. Every call ended with some version of “no, we don’t allow that here”, and as more doors continued to close, I started to doubt if I would even be able to reapply that year, or if God even wanted me in medicine. My wheels spun as I tried to think of other non-medical back up plans, but that was also a dead end because I couldn’t picture myself doing anything other than medicine. And all the work and school I had done would be worthless to put towards something else, I would have to start over. So, returning to my earlier comment, the one thing that continued to emerge, demanding my attention, was that I was terrified of just falling on my face. I was afraid of all of the “what if _____ doesn’t work?” scenarios. I was afraid that nothing was going to work out, and I would just be a failure.
This was my lens. It was a lens of fear, and it was a lens that could only see failure. But whose definition of failure was I seeing? It’s worth it to mention at this point that I was also struggling with having many different, conflicting voices trying to inform me on what to do. Some were telling me I needed to pack up and move to a place where I would be guaranteed experience, to go to a big city for a few months. Some were telling me if I didn’t apply now it would look bad later, and that I would only have one more chance after this year. But regardless of who was speaking, one thing was true: I never heard any advice that agreed. Every voice said something that either directly conflicted another, or that said something just totally different. There was no clear path forward. Additionally, my struggles with fear were also strengthening my false perspective that if I made one “wrong” choice, then I would miss out on all the good things that God had planned for me. I saw God’s plan for my life as a singular path that I had to follow perfectly, or I would never be able to receive what “could have been”. So not only did I have fear about what to do in a professional sense, but also had fear towards God, that there was something He wanted and I was just going to mess it up. To add to my frustrations, I had been praying specifically for direction on what to do, and felt that with each day there was nothing new. No response. It felt like God was just watching, not maliciously, but in a “you get to figure this out on your own” kind of way. What I learned from that part of this experience could fill its own article. But in all of this, there was one thing I knew for sure: even though it seemed like there were no opportunities in Pullman, I was not willing to “sell my soul” to get into school, and was convinced that Pullman was where I was called to stay for the time being.
Back to my study on fear. There was one day that my study brought me to this passage, and it completely changed the lens I had on my situation:
“23 The Lord makes firm the steps
of the one who delights in him;
24 though he may stumble, he will not fall,
for the Lord upholds him with his hand.
(Psalm 37:23-24 NIV)”
I had been focused on the possibility of falling on my face for a long time, but now, here was this passage that says those who delight in the Lord will not fall. It does, however, say we may stumble. As I thought and reflected on my own situation and how fearful I was being, I realized a couple things. Firstly, I started to recognize that my definition of falling and God’s might not be the same. To me, falling had been defined by the world. It had been defined by all those ideas of failure we looked at earlier. What I viewed as falling and what I feared people around me would view as failure were one in the same. But with God, it was different. God said He would make firm my steps, and uphold me with His own hand. It does say, though, that I might stumble. So I began to see that what I viewed as a fall might just be what God would view as a stumble, as a small challenge to overcome on the walk of life and that I would get past it, because no matter what I was not going to fall. Secondly, I was reminded of how my view of God’s plan for my life was hurting me. God does not have one single, specific path that I have to follow perfectly. God will work with me as I go to make firm my steps, just as it says here. So it really didn’t matter if I chose to apply now or later, or if I chose to stay in Pullman even though experience was impossible to find. And ultimately, it wouldn’t matter if I never got accepted to medical school. That would just be a little stumble, and then God’s hand would swoop in and establish my steps again, ensuring that I would not fall. As soon as I was able to see through God’s lens, I stopped worrying about falling on my face, because I knew it was no longer a possibility.
What eventually ended up happening is that I decided to stay in Pullman, and wait until the next year to reapply to school. Amazingly, as soon as I made a decision on what I was doing, the experiences that I needed for school all began to open up. And now, two years later, I am preparing to enter school in August instead of wondering if God even wants me in medicine. I learned through very real experiences that sometimes, God wants us to just be willing to take a step of faith and make a decision, even if we don’t know what the outcome will be, and then He will act to make our next steps clear. For me, I needed to be willing to make a choice in spite of my fear, and choose to be faithful and trust whatever was in my future into God’s hands. But again, my experience with that lesson could take up a whole article by itself. No lesson from that summer, however, was more important than the one I discovered above. I would never have had the faith I needed to make a choice if I had not learned to realign my perspective, to trust that God would make sure that even my failures would only be stumbles and that He would never really let me fall. I learned the difference between faltering and failing, and how I can’t let pressure from the world turn a falter into a faceplant. Does this mean I’m never afraid of anything ever again? No. I’m human, and we all feel fear. But it means I have a reference point that I get to come back to, and a written promise from God so that I may remember that not only do I have a safety net, but I really never had enough power to screw up my life anyway.
Where are you at today? What is your lens about failure? Our enemy loves to feed us lies through the voice of the world that we are inadequate, that our little mistakes and stumbles are marks of failure. Is this the voice you’ve been listening to? The voice of God is in stark contrast, and it tells us that we are enough, that we can trust God and He will always come through for us (Romans 8:28). The lens of faith can be tricky, because it requires trust and courage, the ability to act in the face of fear. It may not be the easier or more instinctive lens to look through, but the lens of faith is the one that will bring us peace, and the ability to rejoice and be faithful in all things. It’s the lens that establishes our steps and lets us see the way ahead, even when that path isn’t visible to our eyes. Will you choose to change your lens?