In Life, the Universe and Everything, the third in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams, Arthur Dent tries to learn how to fly. He does this by trying to throw himself at the ground and missing. As methods of flying go, this would only really work in a slightly wacky comedic science fiction story, but I bring it up because I think that it helps to illustrate the point I want to make today. Failure is a big part of what makes us human.To err is human, after all. One might even be tempted to argue that it is our ultimate weakness. Everything that we try is destined to end in failure, or so it often seems. But I would argue that our ability to fail is actually one of our greatest strengths. After all, if we are doomed - or destined - to fail at everything, then that means that one of the many things at which we will fail is failure itself. If we rebel against God in our hearts, we will only be able to rebel imperfectly. We may assume that we understand perfectly the mind of our Heavenly Father, and we may assume that His will in our regards is stifling, misguided, or otherwise abhorrent, and we may assume that we know best how to order our own affairs, and we may even carry out, or at least, attempt to carry out our own will in direct defiance of what we assume to be God’s will for us, but in this we will ultimately fail. Firstly, because we don’t know God’s will half so well as we would like to believe, so that we can’t be sure that any action we take might not eventually through circuitous routes end up carrying out His will anyway. And secondly, even if the above were not true and we did in fact understand to a high level of accuracy God’s plan for us, and even so wished to carry out our own plan, we are as prone to fail at our own chosen course as we would be had we followed what we thought God’s plan was for us in the first place. We don’t have perfect control over our actions, and we especially don’t have perfect control over what all of the consequences of our actions may be. We will set out to do many things for the right reasons, and they will end up being the wrong thing despite our best wishes. And we will set out to do many things for the wrong reasons, and they will end up being the right thing despite our best efforts. In Douglas Adams’ galaxy, when one throws oneself at the ground and fails to fall, they fly. In the Great Plan of Redemption, when we think we know better, when we harden our heart against the truth, when we set at nought the counsels of God and the Sacrifice of our beloved Savior, we will fall. Over and over and over again. But. There will come a time when we throw ourselves away from God and we miss. Instead of crashing into sin and darkness once more, this time we are lifted up as on the wings of eagles. God blessed each of us with the ability to fail not because He likes to watch all of us stumbling and falling and failing again and again, but because He knows that one day, we will fail to fail. One day, we will stop kicking against the pricks. One day, when the bitter cup is placed before us, instead of saying not thy will but mine be done, we will yield to our Father’s will and partake. I know that every failure we face is only preparation for that last and greatest failure of all. After learning how to fall, we will then learn how to fly.
