Not Mistakes, But Teaching Moments

I saw a promo for a new sci-fi television show called Journeyman.  I don’t know if I will ever watch the show, although I have always been a big fan of science fiction.  I think I enjoy it because it expands our ideas of what is possible.  I do know I liked the message in the few minutes I saw.

The journeyman is talking to someone who in the promo appears to be something of a guide. (A pretty handy thing to have in life.)  He says, “What if I screw up?”  And the woman says, “You will, that’s part of it.”

Someone ought to tell us that when we are beginning our journey, but they never do.  They quote things to us like, “Life is earnest, life is real…”  They grade us and mark things wrong and give us the feeling that we can never make a mistake.

They certainly didn’t tell us in nursing school that it was okay to mess up.  I am sure they had their reasons.  We knew that people’s lives depended on our doing it right.  Yet we all knew if we admitted it that we would make mistakes.  We prayed that they would not be life threatening, but we knew that there would be errors. 

I am not suggesting that we be slipshod in what we do, but that we be bold and unafraid and not let our fear of failure keep us from being who we are called to be.

Messing up is part of the journey.  If we are honest when we think back, we learned more from the mistakes and they were at least as big a part of making us who we are as our successes and accolades.

If, however we are sure that we are not allowed to err, that we have to be infallible, then our failures can make us smaller.  They can diminish us.  Our spirits shrink when they should be freed.  We become paralyzed by the thought that it could happen again, because it will.

Perhaps that is why God so freely offers us forgiveness, so that we can internalize and learn the real lessons from where we have strayed.  Make no mistake about this however, the lesson is not just, “Don’t do that again,” as when we touch a hot stove.  The message of our failures is rich and has more nuance and more texture that the successes of our lives.  So we need to relish them and be strengthened by what we learn from them.

God holds us and guides us throughout our journey, but never more than when we fall.


Lord, We thank you for the richness of life and for what you teach us from our failures.  Amen



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Copyright © 2007, The Rev. Dana Reardon. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Email her at mspastor@aol.com.



The Rev. Dana Reardon is pastor at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, Warwick, RI.  A lifelong Lutheran, she came to ordained ministry after 21 years in nursing, mostly in pediatric intensive care.  She graduated from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in 1998 and served 4 ½ years in Upstate New York before becoming a New Englander.  She is still trying to understand the accent.  While in the Upstate New York Synod she chaired the Stewardship Team.  That began her fascination with what makes stewards -- and more, what makes for generosity. She has three amazing daughters: Pastor Reardon says much of what she knows of life she learned from them.