I like to succeed and to win. I also value intimacy with God. But in my experience, God draws nearest to me in my failures. I have puzzled over this problem much of my life.
When my son was about five, he was sitting at the dinner table with our family while below the table his legs whirled like the blades of a Ninja Blast blender, banging into everything and everybody available.
One of his big sisters valiantly tried to make the most of his annoying energy by inviting him to a game of footsies.
He agreed, but like true competitors everywhere, his contentment was short-lived, as evidenced by his question, “How do you win?”
In the days and years since then I often have wondered, where did my son’s instinct come from? Was it the result of something in his nature or in his environment, a sign of the Fall manifesting itself in my otherwise cherubic child? Or – as my college professors would have asserted – was it a byproduct of society, the irreducible dog-eat-dog ethos of American capitalism invading my precious preschooler through relentless advertising? Of course, I reluctantly concede the possibility of a third option: he gets it from me.
I love competition. As a child, I played every sport I could, whether or not I was any good. I love to watch a good match, especially baseball and soccer. But I’ll settle for boxing, wrestling, or even marathons or the Indy 500. When I watched the winter Olympics as a child, I wanted to be a speed skater. I still have my baseball cards. Competition is part of who I am.
As an undergraduate student at Cornell University, I attended church but not a campus ministry because I was too preoccupied playing soccer. Although college athletes are known for their external success, most experience intense internal struggles. They struggle with comparison, performance anxiety, and the uncertainties of the next match. This was certainly true for me – especially when, after going from success to success in high school sports, my college career was plagued by injury, poor performance, and a healthy dose of bad fortune.
Spiritually, these setbacks were the best thing that ever happened to me. I recognized that my identity was wrapped up in my performance, but actually disentangling my identity from my performance proved incredibly difficult. When I didn’t live up to my own expectations, I beat myself up. Sometimes the hardest person to give grace to is yourself. Spiritual growth came to me, unbeckoned, while sitting on the bench.
Beware the Hazards of Success
Sports make vivid what is true in life more generally: Success poses a moral hazard.
Some Christian teaching emphasizes the need to redefine success away from superficial stuff like fame and fortune toward objects such as faith and family. Well intentioned though it may be, I find this maneuver inadequate for it lets success—and us—off too easily.
Success is a two-layered problem. The drive to achieve and perform can be a cruel master. As long as we hang our hat on future achievements that are contingent and uncertain, we remain restless. The less obvious layer is that actual achievement, even after inked into the record books, tempts us to think too highly of ourselves.
“More than other idols,” Tim Keller wrote in “Counterfeit Gods,” “personal success and achievement lead to a sense that we ourselves are God. . . . To be the very best at what you do, to be at the top of the heap, means no one is like you. You are supreme.”
This is especially true with inner-directed goals such as character and integrity. Although those who achieve fame and fortune may quickly discover them to be hollow, moral achievement is more deeply deceptive. Good deeds, because they tempt us to self-righteousness, pose a tremendous threat to the soul.
I learned all of this the hard way, from experience, but if I had been wiser, I might have taken the less-painful path of learning this lesson from others. If you are at all like me, when you think about success, you imagine a future in which your desires are actualized. And you further delude yourself into believing that when you finally accomplish the next big thing that you will be content. Everything will be better, including you.
Alas, we are naive.
Success shapes people, and often not for the better. Think of Richard Nixon, Tanya Harding, or Ravi Zacharias. Or think of the millions of decorated professionals, perhaps next door or even in your own home, who don’t live in the spotlight but are still melting down, their families suffering from neglect.
This problem isn’t new. Consider Macbeth, for whom the promise of power proves too much to refrain from taking matters into his own hands and murdering King Duncan. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, a successful yet dissatisfied scholar who sells his soul to the devil for the prospect of unlimited knowledge, is a timeless cautionary tale for students. In our generation, we see Faustus in Walter White, the chemistry teacher in the television hit “Breaking Bad,” whose insatiable thirst for more is his undoing.
Proverbs tells us that pride goes before destruction (16:18). It’s also true that success often goes before pride. Character is not fixed—it either develops or devolves. And the collective testimony of history and literature is that success poses a threat to character.
Focus on the Inner Game
The prospect of character development—or degradation—is ever before us. If we are going to ward off the ghosts of Macbeth and Walter White, we must be prepared not to succeed at any cost.
In my several years as a high school soccer coach, I would tell students there are two levels to the game. There is the outer game, which everybody observes on the pitch. And there is the inner game, the temptations to cheat, blame others, or throw a temper tantrum when things don’t go your way.
Both games are difficult. Even level-headed athletes occasionally lose their cool. But both games matter. My point, to paraphrase Matthew 16:26, was that it doesn’t accomplish much to win a game but forfeit your soul.
This insight that success is not “the only thing” is captured well by a line from Joseph Addison’s 18th-century play ”Cato,” a favorite among America’s founding fathers.
“We can’t guarantee success,” reads one line that Washington often quoted. “We can do something better; we can deserve it.” It’s a critical distinction because we are not always going to get what we deserve. In a different context, C.S. Lewis made a similar point. “We shall probably fail,” he said, “but let us go down fighting for the right side.”
Elsewhere Lewis teases out the risks of success for students and scholars. The love of learning, he says, must remain “pure and disinterested,” lest we “come to love knowledge—our knowing—more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us.” He concludes “Every success in the scholar’s life increases this danger.”
Most of our thinking about success underestimates the universal human tendency to seek glory, honor, and power for ourselves rather than for God. This should not surprise us, for it’s one of the primary themes of scripture.
The First Commandment tells us to have no other gods before God because, well, that is what we are inclined to do. King Rehoboam, after ascending to the throne, treated his subjects so harshly that his kingdom divided. King Nebuchadnezzar built a 90-foot image of gold and required everyone to worship it rather than the living God. And King Solomon, who had it all, including not only wealth but also wisdom, fell into faithlessness. The people of Babel built a tower in order to make a name for themselves rather than for God.
Do you see a theme? Those who rise to power and prominence have a strong tendency to fall. And not only those in power but those who aspire to power, too. Scripture is full of women and men who started out better than they finished—of those who lost the inner game.
Fail Forward—Toward Intimacy with God
Ten years after his famous game of footsies, my son stepped onto the soccer field as an oversized 15-year-old in another contest. I can still see the play. It was a breakaway, the ball at his feet, inside the penalty box – and then, he was clobbered. We waited for the whistle and the card, but we waited in vain. Players pleaded. Parents lost their composure. The coach had a cow.
It became my favorite moment in my son’s soccer career. He got up slowly, looking more perplexed than angry, and simply continued playing the game he loved. Afterwards, the other team’s coach commended him for his sportsmanship, and even the referee acknowledged his error. We may have lost the outer game that day, complete with the deep disappointments rehashed on the long drive home, and yet I rejoiced. In fact, I wouldn’t trade that experience for a shelf full of trophies.
In the days and years following, I often have wondered how a parent can take such pleasure in a child’s failure to achieve an objective. Is it possible that my heavenly Father might hold a similar posture toward me? The question lays bare the paradoxical nature of success. None of us aims to fail. Yet, it is failure that begets humility, which protects us from the hazardous entailments of success.
Let’s get real about the spirituality of success and failure. When I was in college, I aspired to excel academically, athletically, and with relationships. I prayed for success. Sometimes I got what I wanted, but often I did not.
I suppose if somehow I always prayed according to God’s will, my prayers would never fail. But that is not the world in which I live. So, how shall I make sense of prayers that fail, at least by my earthly standards and expectations?
If I am willing to be brutally honest with myself about my desire to put myself before God and even to be God, then prayer is put into a whole new perspective. When I pray to be delivered from evil, I am praying in part for protection from myself. I am literally, albeit paradoxically, praying that God will not give me success in all my endeavors.
This is not an argument against having goals, and it is certainly not an argument against working hard or playing hard. The author of Hebrews encourages diligence over laziness, and points us to faithful exemplars who “enforced justice, … stopped the mouths of lions,” and more (11:33). Clearly, there is such a thing as sanctified stewardship of achievement and even of wealth.
And yet these same models of faithfulness were destitute and mistreated, stoned and sawn in two, which should seriously temper our expectations of earthly reward or recognition. Such expectations are unrealistic. Worse, they often cross the line into idolatry. We may not realize it right away, for idols are subtle and creep into our lives unnoticed, but when success becomes our god, it takes more than it gives. It will take your time and energy and, like idols of every kind, will make promises it has no power to grant.
There is really nothing more liberating than the freedom to fail. And we are free to fail precisely because God is sovereign over all things including the results of our efforts. We are no longer slaves to success. Harry Blamires, in his book “A God Who Acts: Recognizing the Hand of God in Suffering and Failure,” argues that because God often teaches us through our failures, we can and should rejoice in them.
Ultimately, I believe God cares even more about intimacy than instruction. He surely cares more about your inner game than any scoreboard. After disappointments and setbacks of all sorts, he sits with us on our long drives home. As with the Israelites, God uses our failures to draw us near to him.
The ultimate paradox of success, then, is this: the path to true success lies through suffering. We are called to run the race and not grow weary. How? By looking at God’s Son, who endured hostility and even the cross (Hebrews 12:1-3). If Jesus had to learn obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5:8), we shouldn’t be surprised when we find ourselves traveling a similar path.
Karl Johnson is the executive director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and founder of Chesterton House at Cornell University.
Read the other articles in our Following Christ in College series here:
https://byfaithonline.com/keeping-faith-on-campus-chasing-identity/
https://byfaithonline.com/knowledge-wisdom-and-fearing-god/
https://byfaithonline.com/enjoying-college-and-the-pursuit-of-pleasure/