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Day 26: Failing

This is also part of becoming human.

And in the grand narrative of the world, missing two days of a thirty-one day writing challenge is barely worth mentioning as a failure. I realize this.

What’s worth mentioning, though, is that failure is inseparable and essential to the process of becoming human.

(As much as I wish it was not.)

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A reader emailed me this morning to say, “The last two days you haven’t posted, ….is everything okay?”

I’m grateful for that. Thank you.

Yes, everything is ok. I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open right now because I went dancing until they closed the club down last night, but I do not regret this decision. This is why the Lord invented coffee — for such a Monday as this.

I cleaned my house, played with my boys, went to a concert, went to church, danced. Just regular human stuff.

Sitting on my couch on Saturday afternoon, I scraped the inside of my mind for something to write about. Nothing. Completely blank inside. So I shrugged and decided to skip it. Then it was Sunday, and once you’ve missed one day in a row you may as well miss two, right? And now it’s Monday.

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“You do not have to be good”.

I’ve told you before about how hard it is for me to believe that. But I’m getting there, slowly. I’m learning to accept that it’s ok to take a weekend off and pick it up again on Monday, to write 29 out of 31 days and let that be enough.

It’s easy, with small stuff like this. It’s a little bit harder with the big things in my life that feel like failures — the messes I can’t clean up, the broken things I can’t fix, the questions that come back over and over again without answers.

Five years ago if you would have asked me what my worst fear is, I would’ve been quick to tell you that I was afraid of failure.

Now I know that I was never really afraid of failure — all along I was afraid that if I failed I wouldn’t be loved.

I’m learning that this isn’t true. There is so much love in the world that no amount of failure could ever render us unworthy of being relentlessly adored.

In the words of John Steinbeck:

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

This isn’t failing, not really. It is only becoming human. And it’s ok.


During the month of October, I’m joining the Write31Days challenge to talk about 31 Days of Becoming Human. Click here to read all posts in the series.

published October 26, 2015

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