Success? Or Failure? Those are Your Two Options

"Mom, what if I fail at life?" --asked by my 11 year old son in the car on the way to school this morning.

What if I fail at life.

Oh, how I long to take this child up in my arms like I did when he was only four years old, and hold him and hug him and kiss him, cradle him and stroke his face and tell him, "Child, child. You are loved. You are a treasure. You are enough. God will hold you in the palm of His mighty hand all the days of your life..."

But he's a fifth grader now, and he's jumping out of the car and on his way to class, and this being a mom of a fifth grader gig is no walk in the park.

"Life is hard. Some people give up. But, never give up. Never say die. Always fight." I knew the words were lame the moment they came out of my mouth.

How do you answer such a question?

Life isn't a test you have to pass. Life is not proving yourself. Life isn't a competition to see who makes it to the finish line and who sets up a lawn chair mid-race. Life can't be reduced to these kinds of ridiculous metaphors.

Every day is made up of little choices along the way. Every day is filled with battles won and battles lost. A hundred times every day we are reaching finish lines and setting up lawn chairs. If we're honest, every day carries within it the power to reduce us to dust. Life can indeed feel like a giant boot grinding us into the ground.

Life does both these things: It raises us up to be conquerers, and it flattens us.

I think we fail when we don't look deep. When we don't ask the hard questions, like "Why am I here?" or "What does this all mean?" We fail at life when we are satisfied with all the things in our day that pacify us, when we don't discipline ourselves to do the very brave thing: Sit in a quiet room, and reflect, open up God's words to us, or pray, and then get up and do as we ought.

My son struggles to keep himself organized. He doesn't mind academic challenges or even hard work, but he fears his greatest weakness will trip him up. Maybe every one of us has that one thing that just never matured, we never mastered it, and so in our thoughts it masters us, haunting us as we wonder, "When am I found out?" "When does this deficit, this little failure to get this one thing right, catch up with me and ruin the whole thing?"

Fear holds us captive, like a powerful specter.

But to reduce a human being's entire earthly existence to "Fail" or "Success" is absolutely a false simplification. Of all the things that life is, these two options couldn't be more incorrect.

I guess it's easy for an 11-year-old to look at life through the lense of success or failure. He is thinking concretely, literally. Everything to him is either/or, never both. My prayer for him now is that as he matures, and begins to comprehend just how messy it all is, that instead of rejecting life's value, he will have the wisdom to embrace it for what it is, which is often confusing, and, at best, incomprehensibly magnificent.