(un)Failing Love
There’s a slight hum in my writing room I’ve never noticed before.
And when I say "writing room," I mean the guest bedroom. In this room, we store the overflow of our weekly Costco purchases and ignore the broken closet door that neither my husband nor I desire to fix. I used to have a writing shed with a beautiful chandelier that I was given from my grandmother’s house. It smelled of moss candles and library books. But when we sold our last house, we sold a piece of my heart with it.
And now I sit in this multipurpose room, where guests come and go, as does my desire to write in it. And you know what? I still hear that hum. What is it, I wonder? Maybe it's the hot air rising from the floor registers or the overachieving light fixture above me. Whatever it may be, I can finally hear it. I can’t tell you how many times I have been in this room and not heard it.
I’m asking myself, "Why am I noticing it now?"
Well, perhaps because failure has drawn me into a more attuned place. That familiar buzz of possibility has faded into the silence of a flatline. Something didn’t work. Well, actually, a collection of things didn’t work.
Have you ever had moments like this? Where the hubbub of your activity slowed just enough for you to begin to connect the dots and see that where there was supposed to be a complete circle, there is a broken ring?
How do you respond to failure? And how do you define it?
People have often looked at my life and assumed that failure isn’t an option. Even my mom’s best friend used to joke with her about me when I was in high school: "How do you think Megan will react if she gets less than an A?"
The reality is that feelings of failure do not equate to actual failure. This is where I get it wrong most of the time. I hate people thinking of me as a perfectionist or an achiever—but the ego can’t keep the truth at bay. Jesus most often speaks to me about this very thing. I want people to see me as pulling my own weight, but that goes directly against the will of God, who says we are to cast our burdens on Him. Don’t get me wrong; I throw my burdens onto him, but often like a yo-yo. There is a momentary casting before I pull it all back into a coil within myself.
When I try to do good things and they don’t go as planned, my heart goes quiet, like that awkward silence after a bad wedding speech.
But is it failure when things go wrong? Or is real failure an inability to see that we aren’t expected to get it right all the time?
The famous wedding verse, 1 Corinthians 13:8, comes to mind: "Love never fails." The word "fail" in the Greek (piptei) literally means "unsuccessful." God’s love is never unsuccessful. It never suffers failure. So how do we reconcile our imperfect attempts to love like Jesus when it looks a little bit more like flopping around in an inch of water than soaring on the heights of success?
When I realized that so many things were coming undone in the process of trying to love others well, I felt the familiar sting of emotion in my eyes. I fumbled for my phone and began praying Psalm 16, which has become my "middle of the mess" mantra this year.
“Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.’”
The older I become, the more I realize that following Jesus isn’t a straight line. It isn’t a mountain ascent. It isn’t even a black-and-white document. It is love that never fails. It is a certainty that even when my human attempts at love seem to be losing the battle of brokenness, God’s love will come through. The Spirit is drawing my attention to the quiet hum of the ordinary and uncertain. To the undone and out of luck portions of my heart, He is seeming to say, "This is where real life is found, on the other side of mistakes and befuddles."
Need and desperation for an unfailing God are acts of faith. He has to do what I simply cannot.
Last night, the sun dipped behind Bear Mountain, and I watched as a herd of deer slowly moved across our property. Every step sloughed deep snow.The sky was purple and yellow. The snow was blue and sparkly. They walked in a line towards the stream that runs through our property. I stood in awe of their slow yet diligent journey towards water. A deer does not struggle with the fear of failure like I do.
They do, however, thirst. They do have needs, just as I do, to get to the refreshing waters of deep and satisfying love.
As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. (Ps. 42:1-2a)
You see, it isn’t fear of failure that drives me to try again tomorrow. It is a thirst for something that actually gives life.
That hum in my writing room is still there. It’s quiet—below the radar—but constant and almost like a heartbeat in the womb. I may not be able to see where it is coming from, but I know it is there.
This is the unfailing love of God.
For the perfectionists and burnouts, the ones in deep snow with dehydrated souls, the ones who are pressing on towards the promise of satisfaction in Jesus, know this: failure isn’t an option; it is inevitable.
In this godless world you will continue to experience difficulties. But take heart! I’ve conquered the world. (Jn. 16:33, MSG)
How freeing it is to know that failure is swept up in the person of God and is handed back to us in large helpings of grace, acceptance, and more grace! However, some days I don’t embrace that freedom. I fight against it.
Why? Because I don’t hear the hum of God’s unfailing love; I only hear the tap dance of my "not enoughness" on the stage of the false self. I am so tired of her song and dance, I’d like to throw tomatoes. But God isn’t asking me (or you) to detest such tendencies; he is asking for trust with them.
Pastor and Author Juanita Rasmus was on one of my favorite podcast, Makers and Mystics. She talked about hitting rock bottom and being undone by the things that she thought gave her identity and meaning. Rasmus spoke a lot of the untethering, the stripping, and the purging of the soul’s secondary desires. This is the dawning reality that Jackie Hill Perry identifies as "loving creation more than the Creator himself." St. John of the Cross gives us a glimpse of what happens after we allow ourselves to be undone by the hum of his unfailing love:
I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.– St. John of the Cross
You see, failure is an illusion of the false self. It is a sneaky form of pride that steals from the adoration of the God who chooses to love us, flaws and all. There is nothing more glorious than to embrace my identity as a failed perfectionist and to clamor for real intimacy with my Savior. I am in the middle of the renovation of the heart, like Dallas Willard writes:
Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today... They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity.
Willard uses a military term, "beachhead." It is almost as if Willard was also watching the twilight deer walk across the snowy hollow from my living room window. Perhaps, like the deer, we are to form a line in the deep snowfalls of our lives. We are to slowly and steadily move towards streams of living water, no matter the conditions of our lives or the conditions of our hearts. We are living in the "midst of a failing and futile humanity," and we must be able to pick out the low hum of his unfailing love in our failed attempts at being good enough on a daily basis.
My greatest desire in this season, to surrender to the undoing of God. I am feeling stripped of my own familiar coordinates of meaning and activity and while it is disorienting; it is lovingly directive. It is as if God is turning down the volume through my own misconceptions of failure so I can finally notice the hum that has been there all along.
My love never fails. My love never fails. My love never fails.
PRAYER
Lord, I long to forget myself and the failures I will inevitably make. I truly desire to see the balls dropped as opportunities for grace and intimacy to grow between us. I repent of the times I've tried to be good enough for your love. I repent of looking at what I can do for you as the only proof that I truly love you. Show me how to rest in you. I am the sinner people were shocked you chose to have dinner with. Thank you for always making room for me and my perfectionism at the table of your grace. Amen.
