Why Resilience Is The Better Response To Failure

For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes. — Proverbs 24:16 (NIV)

Without looking at her directly, I tried to assess the damage. My friend’s young daughter had just taken a spill on my kitchen floor. An untied shoelace seemed to have caused the tumble. During the few times I’d watched this little girl, I noticed a pattern. When genuinely hurt, she reached out for comfort. But when the injury amounted to nothing more than a bruised ego, she pulled away and tried to find a place to hide.

As I continued to subtly observe my little charge, I suddenly realized how my initial reactions mirror hers. When I fall, or fail as I now call it, I tend to pull away and long to disappear into a cave or a hole. Just that week I had several fails:

• Poor tax planning created a huge amount owed to the IRS
• An error in marking my calendar resulted in me being a day early to an appointment 
• A misunderstanding caused me to give faulty information to someone I respect

In my embarrassment I found myself pulling away from my friends and loved ones. I desperately wanted a place to hide while the refrain of my heart followed a familiar pattern: I should have known better. I should have done better. 

I’m not sure when I began to associate failure with shame, but one of my earliest memories revolves around a mistake I made ~ in the first grade. The assignment : write out the numbers from 1 to 20 and draw pictures to correspond to each number. Simple enough. Except I didn’t hear the 1 to 20 part and continued counting well beyond. When a classmate told me I had gone too far, I tried to fix my paper. But, as my six-year-old self soon discovered, crayon doesn’t erase. Mortified, I turned in my paper with ugly blotches and gaping holes. That night I couldn’t sleep. My mother found me crying in bed, terrified that my teacher would be angry with me. 

Of course I survived that fail ~ and my teacher wasn’t angry. But for much of my life, failure and shame have been inseparable companions. Thinking now of my young friend, I didn’t want this to be true for her. A Scripture I memorized long ago came to my aid:

For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes. (Proverbs 24:16 NIV)

We will all fall, or fail. But when we walk with the Lord, we develop resilience. He teaches us through our failures and gives us the strength to rise up and try again. In His eyes, the only true failure is refusing to rise again. 

In Scripture, the word seven is often used as a symbol of completeness or perfection. I imagine this means we will continue to fall, or fail, throughout our lives. But as long as we continue to learn and grow from our mistakes, each failure will lead us to become more like Christ ~ until we reach maturity, or perfection, in our faith. 

Kneeling down to tie my little friend’s shoe, I looked her in the eyes. “Everyone falls,” I said, “and that’s okay. The most important thing is to learn and to get back up. Next time, just make sure your shoelaces are tied before you run.”

“Okay,” she sighed. And we got up to explore what the rest of the day had in store for us.

Lord Jesus, thank You for the wisdom we find in the Scriptures. When we fail, it hurts. But when we walk with You, we develop the resilience we need to rise again. Help us to have the courage to learn from our mistakes and to keep trying until we reach maturity in our faith. We ask this in Your name. Amen.