I handed in my church history test, convinced I had failed.\u00a0Not in the overly dramatic sense of not getting a perfect but a serious acknowledgement at my impending very, very bad grade. I was angry at myself, for all the time I had invested studying with the output being sub par, worried that my grade would reflect to the professor a malcontent for the class\u00a0or the course matter, and subjecting myself to the disappointment of my family and friends.<\/p>\n
I have since gotten the test back, and as it will happen to be, I definitely did not fail.\u00a0 Not even close (meaning\u00a0it was indeed overly dramatized in the playground of my melding mind and emotions), which forced me to reflect on what had caused me to be ruffled so.\u00a0The answer: failure.\u00a0I didn’t want to fail. But, I have never been afraid to fail before, so\u00a0why was it so imperative to me that I not fail?<\/p>\n
I mean, we are constantly surrounded by the fears of failing in lots of things –\u00a0life, love, work – but I think there’s something more.\u00a0In the past, if I had failed I was always confident I could fix it.\u00a0Coming from the world of theatre and art, risk taking is the nature of the beast, so I never shied away from taking chances because I knew I would learn from it and that I\u00a0retained the power fix it next time around.\u00a0However in this, I didn’t have the confidence that I would even be able to fix it, being a stranger to this new land. So what was I going to do?\u00a0For some reason it is habit to ask each other how we thought the test went. When I was asked, because I am terrible at lying, I told them, ending in\u00a0” But, I’ll just have to do better next time.”<\/p>\n
And one person said, “Yeah, you could.\u00a0But maybe this is just not something you’re going to be good at.”<\/p>\n
Looking back at this brief conversation I see the stark truth in that simple phrase.\u00a0I should not\u00a0worry\u00a0about being\u00a0good at everything.\u00a0It is impossible, and as much as I like the impossible, cleaving to this\u00a0is going to drive me insane.\u00a0God has given us each certain gifts and if we stay busy trying to be good at other things, we neglect what actually would grow\u00a0to bear fruit and handicap the Body of Christ.\u00a0So I find much value in everything I am learning and will learn, but I need to be okay with failing at them, not supplant the gifts God has given me with my own human agenda as to be a greater service to The Kingdom.\u00a0Similar to the idea of fasting – create more space in ourselves for God to be within us.<\/p>\n
For letting go, surrendering success measured on a scale different than God’s, is not failing at all.\u00a0Actually, not giving myself or others the grace to fail is\u00a0the only\u00a0failure we should fear accruing.<\/p>\n
Rebecca Dix, MDiv Student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I handed in my church history test, convinced I had failed.\u00a0Not in the overly dramatic sense of not getting a perfect but a serious acknowledgement at my impending very, very bad grade. I was angry at myself, for all the time I had invested studying with the output being sub par, worried that my grade…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1731,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[31,33,36,40],"series":[],"class_list":["post-542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theological-reflection","tag-seminary-community","tag-seminary-experiences","tag-spiritual-journeys","tag-women-in-ministry"],"yoast_head":"\r\n