If you struggle with biologically based depression, as many people in my family do, then feeling good is rare. Today is one of those days. I breath and think: Hurrah!
And then the day keeps grinding along and I hear bad news and worst of all, I fail. I mess up. I fall short of the mark that a reasonable and moral man should have achieved. When that happens, I feel bad.
Feeling bad is . . . often bad. Yet just as physical pain is necessary to keep us from physical harm, “take your hand off the stove!”, so mental pain can help us avoid deeper harms. Sometimes I feel bad because I should feel bad! Failing my ideals (and the higher the goal, the easier it is to fail) is not good.
I sometimes feel like a failure and have been fascinated to discover that even far more successful people than I am feel that way too. Of course, that does not mean I am not a failure. A sense of insecurity in a successful person does not mean I am a success. Generally, my sense of discouragement is based on something . . . and that something is often true.
I have failed, am failing, and will fail.
One response to failure is to say: We all fail, so cheer up. This is not unlike saying: We all get sick so cheer up. It is true we all get sick, but my sickness still feels awful. To make matters worse, my failure often impacts those around me . . . even if only through my regrets.
There is, I think, a personality type that can brush off failures. They exist in all religions and amongst people with no religion. This can be a good gift if it prevents endless self-examination, pride disguised as Socratic insight. The ability to get up after failure and move on is a form of humility and should be nourished. Yet this gift can also be misused: a person may say “sorry” and not make restitution or correct the error.
None of this matters for those of us who do not have the gift of easily getting up after a defeat. We are not so resilient when failure comes and telling us to “snap out of it” may lead to our snapping, but at you, not out of it.
We know. We just can not.
One thing that does help me is hope: the reasonable expectation that things will be better. Hope is one area where a believer is better off than an unbeliever. Life makes sense if there is a God and all the spreadsheets will work and show a positive balance. God is good, just, and merciful and will see to this good work. My failure is real, the consequences matter, but God gives me eternity to make the grade.
I believe in God for other reasons, experiential and intellectual, but as a result of my knowledge that God exists, I am never without reason to hope. Call hope the fringe benefit of theism. Hope that God can forgive and heal does not make it all go away in some easy or trivial sense. Failure is still painful, but sorrow with hope is redemptive, not deadly.
If I remember God and His love, failure breeds hope in God because having hope in myself has already been shown to be a failure! God could, can, and will bring goodness, truth, and beauty to the cosmos and my failure is hardly significant enough to disturb even one data point in the great divine plan.
Have I failed? Yes. Has God failed? Never. Hear the words of God in I John 3:20 : for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. God condemns our moral failures and our follies, but God does not condemn us.
Thank God there is hope in God.
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