Having a vision or mission statement can be of great value. Of even greater value is the understanding and purpose of failure. Whenever I talk to anyone starting in a new season of life, I ask them to catalog the personal failures and betrayals they will experience. Many times they look at me with a quizzical look. At that point, I take some time to explain what I am about to write in the following paragraphs.

Jan and I have shared with people from many walks of life that it was our redeemed failures and betrayals that molded our lives in the most profound ways. Adjusting our course after failure or betrayal set us on a new course, a course we would come to discover would lead us greater joy and fruitfulness than our original plan.  When a betrayal took place, it was forgiveness and the power of ongoing blessings extended to our adversaries that kept us from following the betrayer into a dark place to experience relational and spiritual death. 

In these processes of life, we discovered our strengths were overrated. It was in our weakness and brokenness where dependence on God was discovered. In that place of dependence, the Lord was able to enter our pain to perform miracles and open doors that the best of our wisdom, planning, and endurance could not open.

A person can be decades into an endeavor, but still not see the promised fruit of their effort fully come to pass. Many times, in a desire to move on, they did not properly engage the painful seasons and the hidden blessings waiting to be discovered in their inquiry. In a desire to get away from the pain they forgot to perform a spiritual inventory of their failures and the betrayals. In the inventory were the needed course corrections that would have led them in a different direction – a direction that can only be known when God’s redemptive and resurrection power intervenes and is allowed to alter the course of our lives in ways we had never imagined.