The Room to Fail

Everyone says it –the first year of teaching is a grunt. (Grunt: The Montana word for straight-up hiking trails.) I made it through that first year when I knew nothing.

Maybe less than nothing, if that’s possible.

So I learned on the backs of everyone around me. Kudos to the secretaries who answered exactly 746,482 questions. A huge thanks to the students who were my guinea pigs every day. Poor little guinea pigs. And hallelujah for the husband and children and friends who listened to me moan my way through the year.

This experience is amplified in life.

Here we are fresh out of the Dark Side and transferred into the Kingdom of Light. How much do we know?

Big fat nothin’.

Green as Montana grass after a rainstorm.

We start practicing righteousness, and we have to practice on somebody. So we mess up relationships and mess up in prayer and mess up in understanding the Bible. We say the wrong things and do the wrong things. Completely miss doing the right things. It’s almost like we don’t know what we’re doing.

We don’t.

So –who will give us a safe place to try and fail and try?

Bless that school of mine –they’re giving me an opportunity to come back and show that I know something now, with a renewed teaching contract.

Massive grace. Can’t even measure this much grace.

On this journey toward becoming the righteous people God had in mind all along, we must give each other latitude for error.

The Peter came and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?”

Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.”  (Matthew 18:21-22 NASB)

Forgive tons. Write it off as that steep learning cliff.

And maybe if we could celebrate the incremental improvements along the way? (Like I totally know how to make double-sided copies on the school copier now. It’s a big deal.)

Who in your life needs some room to learn to do things right?

We could…

Be generous.

Be warm.

Overlook stuff.

‘Cause we’re all the new guy.