Gold Medals and Spectacular Failing

The Vancouver Olympic flame

Yesterday, my daughter, who has memorized pretty much every statistic on every gymnast from London or eligible for Rio, lamented that she has to wait two entire years for the next Olympics.

I can commiserate. I turn on my television and watch it about once every two years. I realize this rate of use makes even owning the thing a debatable point; nevertheless, we actually went out and bought a new one (in 2004, I believe) because I wanted to watch the Olympics. They didn't come in on the TV my dad had left me in 1990. Yes, seriously.

The Olympic Games is pretty much the only thing I find our TV useful for, but for those two weeks, I have meals and mail forwarded to the living room. This gives me plenty of time to muse over deeper meanings of it all, and I found one in the men's figure skating competition this past winter. And no, it has nothing to do with their outfits.

Did you notice something unusual this year? Every single final round athlete in the men's skating competition this winter fell. Every. One. OK, maybe not the American from Chicago, but he had enough almost-falls to make up for it.

Yet still, three men went home with gold, silver, and bronze, and the world believed they had seen the best skaters alive out there on the ice. Even with all the spills. All the mistakes. All the “could have been betters.”

Which really made me think. None of those men had to do quad jumps. None of them had to push themselves to try impossible tricks and defy whatever had been done before. None of them had to fall. They could have played it safe and gone home unbruised and satisfied that they had done the best they could. But none of them did.

Every one of them pushed it to the next level, tried, fell, and went home as victors anyway. 

And it occurred to me how absolutely beautiful it is that falling on our faces can be a victorious moment.

It's beautiful that, in this arena, failing at a hard thing is rewarded more than playing it safe and succeeding at something too easy.

Actual Olympic podium. I wonder who stood here?
And how many times they failed?

Try Hard Things

You get more points for having the guts to whip a quad out there and accidentally touch down with two feet than for doing a double-toe-loop that you could do when you were thirteen. You're recognized for attempting something challenging when you could have stuck with the safe and easy touch down. I love that. Victory from spectacularly trying and equally spectacularly wiping out. And, of course, getting back up to keep skating anyway.

Failure in the Bible

Scripture has many examples of “failure.” Imagine being Isaiah or Jeremiah, told to go warn people of disaster and plead with them to return to God—knowing you will fail. Knowing it. This is your life's work, guys. It will utterly and dismally fail. Go for it anyway. And—they did. With all their hearts. Sometimes broken and angry, sometimes filled with compassion, they kept at it, with all they had. They threw those jumps in the air, praying that one soul, perhaps, would notice and listen. They fell. And as Proverbs tells us, “The godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again” (24.16).

Then, there's Jesus. Beaten, naked, alone. Dead. Bystanders would assume he had jumped too high. He would never get up again. But he did. He tackled the biggest jump in the universe—bridging the gap between heaven and earth—and it looked like an overambitious failure. Instead, it was the beginning of a new universe.

Jesus didn't actually fail. And we actually do. But maybe we need to look at it from the point of view of that new universe. The one where our views of success and failure are like trying to see clearly in a mud puddle rather than a flawless glass. The one where God pleads with us—just jump. JUMP. Leave the results up to me. I've got this.

Maybe, it's the fear that keeps us from trying new things, throwing it all out there on the ice and possibly falling hard, that keeps us from real victory. Maybe we never get that golden moment we long for because so often we would rather do what we know we can do. Spinning in the air is dizzying, and we'd prefer to do a quick hop and call it our best effort.

But it isn't. Because so long as we never push it one more level up, never find a challenge just a little tougher than the last one, never seek that one risk we are not sure is within us but we need to find out, we are not giving it our best. We're giving it our OK. Gold medals are never won by OK. (Unless all the other speed skaters wipe out in front of you. Then, well, it happens.)

What do you know you need to stretch to try right now? It's OK to fall. OK to fail spectacularly. OK to put everything you have out there and mop up the mess. It's just not OK to never jump at all.

Join the conversation about failure, discipleship, the Bible, and more at Jill's blog, here.