Fear of Failure

This picture shows me at age 15, at my first nationals competition, in my first race. I was so nervous that I lost my swimming brain and ducked my head under the water at the end of the race, a rule violation. I was disqualified from the race. My mother and I flew to California for me to be disqualified. I remember this race as if it was yesterday (it was 27 years ago).

I have spent a lot of my life fearing failure. I remember that in my senior year in high school, I had the opportunity to compete in the state-wide forensics competition (public speaking, not the dead body kind of forensics). I was so sick to my stomach on that day that I thought I would have to run to the bathroom while standing at the lectern to give my speech. That same year, I lived in fear of losing the state swimming championship. I did get sick right before my race, actually running from the locker room to the starting blocks.

I swam in national and international competitions, always in fear of coming in last.  I decided to go to law school, and took the LSATs (the entrance exam for law school), sure that I would bomb. After law school, I took the bar exam, convinced that I failed.

There is something wired in me, and in many of us, to expect failure even in the face of success. I can remember telling people, "I'm sure I'll come in last place" or "I bet I failed the bar exam," and they looked back at me as if I had two heads. It is amazing the distance between perception of self and reality. Yes, sometimes I failed, but when that happened, I simply chalked it up to the "real" reality. When I succeeded, something deep inside of me always believed that I had inexplicably managed to fool the time clock, the forensics judges, the law school examiners.

After those experiences, you would think I would choose less stressful paths. Nope.

Now I live in church world. It might seem that in church world, all is safe and there is no fear or risk of failure. Nothing could be further from the truth. After living through swimming competitions, national and international rankings, college NCAA championships, law school entrance exams, bar exams, and lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, I can tell you that fear of failure in church world might actually be more acute than in those other scenarios.

Why? There is more at stake. People coming into a relationship with Christ is more important than any of those other situations that are, at least in the long run, rather meaningless.

And yet fear of failure is no excuse not to take risks. Where would we be without people taking risks even though fear of failure was almost debilitating? Where would the church be? There would be no church. When Christ said, in Matthew 28, for his followers to go and make disciples of all nations, fear could have paralyzed them. We can all be eternally grateful that it didn't.

I'm a small part of Nativity's exciting, scary, unknown endeavor to host a worship service (not a Mass) for those people, especially cultural Catholics, who do not have a church and who might not even like church, in an effort to offer them a worship experience that meets them where they are. To hear more about this effort, join us at Nativity on Sundays in January.

I've calmed with age, so I don't think I'll have to worry about the distance between the bathroom and the worship service. But it is scary, in a good way. It's unknown. It might be a success. It might not.

But we are certain to fail if we don't make the effort.