Hope For The HopelessSample

Join the Hall of Faith and Failure

Look at Jesus. When He was baptized in the Jordan River, near the Dead Sea, which was the lowest elevation on planet Earth, God proclaimed Him to be His Beloved Son. Then, when He was transfigured on the top of Mount Hermon (the highest mountain in all of Israel), God once again repeated that statement—that He was the Beloved Son.

When we are at the peak, we are beloved, just like Jesus.

When we are in the lowest valley, we are beloved, just like Jesus.

When Elijah was strong in faith the Bible says that the ravens fed him and a widow sustained him. But later, when he was at his lowest point, wracked with doubts and feeling like a failure, it says that angels waited upon him and God Himself fed him.

Sometimes God works through our doubts more than through our faith. When we reach the end of ourselves we find a new beginning with God. What starts out as an air ball that completely misses the hoop becomes something that God can use as an alley-oop to throw down on our enemy.

I don’t know about you, but I make a lot of dumb choices.

But God adores me and forgives me, which means that even my worst failures—and yours—can’t separate us from His love. He loves you so, so, so, so much. And He gleefully forgives you. Therefore, none of your failures can keep you from your destiny.

Irving Stone spent his life studying great men and women, and turning the results of his research into novelized biographies. Two of the most popular featured Michelangelo and Van Gogh. When he was asked if he’d found any sort of thread that runs through the lives of the great people he’d written about, he replied: 

I write about people who sometime in their life…have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished…and they go to work. They are beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified and for years they get nowhere. But every time they are knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people. And at the end of their lives they have accomplished some modest part of what they set out to do.

I vibe with that.

Hebrews 11 gives us the “Hall of Faith.”

Maybe we need an Optimisfit’s “Hall of Faith and Failure.” It would include a lot of the people in the Bible and elsewhere who kept failing until they found their way to their dreams.

It would include me.

And you.