psalm 4 on Failure

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

I can remember that afternoon as if it were yesterday. I (Doug) was standing out in the middle of the green grass of the quad on campus, singing as loudly as I could. Twenty of my Christian friends an...

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

In an essay on friendship, the renowned poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “My entire success, such as it is, is composed of particular failures.” There’s a deep truth in that line—one many of us need to...

“Casey at the Bat” has got to be the most well-known sports poem in American history. The “Mudville nine” are down four to two, with one inning left with two outs. Two men wait at second and third bas...

David Seamands (1922-2006) was an author, scholar, evangelical renewal leader and counselor. In an article for Christianity Today , he shares his earnest experience of many of his patients who we...

In his famous 1934 campaign for the governorship of California, the author and activist Upton Sinclair took an unusual step. Before the election, he published a short book titled I, Governor of Cal...

In Circle of Quiet , Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farra...

Gerry, a Catholic, went to confession and told the priest he had taken some wood from work. The priest asked, “How much?” Gerry replied, “Not much, Father, just enough to build a garage at the back of...

As a baby, Albert Einstein caused his parents some concern. His head seemed disproportionately large, and he did not start speaking until he was three. As a young man, his career faced setbacks, in...

We read of the temptations of Jesus, but we never hear of a confession of sin on his part. He never asked for forgiveness, though he told his followers to do so. This lack of any sense of moral failur...

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the ar...

Sometimes what seems like a failure is actually the seed of God’s work. As Mark Batterson tells the story, it started with David and Svea Flood. Sent to the Congo by a church in Sweden, they helped es...

Winston Churchill was once asked what prepared him most to speak out against Hitler and risk political suicide during the 1930s. At that time, the official British position (most notably espoused by C...

A young man won admission to college. Instead of writing a letter of congratulations, his father penned this note: Now it is a good thing to put this business very plainly before you. Do not think I...

Had it not been for a confident wife, Sophia, we might not have listed among the great names of literature the great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Nathaniel, a heartbroken man, went home to tell h...

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

In 2014’s Oscar-winning film Birdman, Michael Keaton plays a washed-out actor trying to start his life again after a series of failed roles. But his efforts are haunted by the voice of the “Birdman,” ...

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem fairly intrigued by the pe...

The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

Triumph and failure always go together in the wait of faith. They are the head and tail of the same coin. Show me a person who has had no struggle with waiting, whose faith has known no swings between...

Sometimes God takes our greatest failures and turns them into our greatest successes. Charles “Chuck” Colson had risen the ladder of national political success at breakneck speed. After a tour in the ...

When he was 7 years old, his family was forced out of their home because of a legal technicality. He had to work to help support them. At age 9, while still a backward, shy little boy, his mother die...

Young men in his church were expected to pray aloud in Communion Services. So the young Larry Crabb felt pressured to pray, even though he had a problem with stuttering. He remembers offering a terrib...

Remember Aesop’s Fox? Having spied some ripening grapes on a lofty branch, he tried with all his might to jump and take them. Once it dawned on him that he would not—could not—succeed, sulked away, sa...

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference bet...

In The Last Arrow, Erwin McManus shares the story of Mark Floyd, a businessman who convinced investors to place $20 million dollars in an investment that ultimately failed. Instead of crawling into a ...

As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining t...

Quite often the absence of immediate success is the mark of a genuine call., My Creator, My friend.

Tom Watson, Sr., is the man who founded IBM. You can imagine the money, the investments, the experiments, this man, and his multi-billion dollar company have made through the years. Once, years ago, w...