Critical Truths: "I can afford to fail."
Oct 18, 2021
by Brenda Jung
Well-meaning parents, teachers, speakers, youth pastors, and other leaders who speak to emerging youth leaders often say to them, “Don’t be afraid to fail,” “Take risks,” and “Get out of your comfort zone.” If even adults have a hard time executing these exhortations, how much more for preteens and teens whose sense of identity is still being established in the precarious life stage of adolescence? Whether or not they realize it, preteens and young teens are in a critical season--the logic stage, when they are thinking more deeply and critically about everything, including themselves. In a word, adolescents are searching for significance. *
This is not to say that we adults are not still searching for their significance long past adolescence. However, many adults have lived long enough to find enough of their sense of significance to risk failure, disapproval, rejection, and shame. Youth with limited life experience are usually not mentally, socially, nor emotionally prepared to handle failure, disapproval, rejection, and shame. Their sense of significance and identity are too costly a price to pay for failure. Therefore, instead of simply expecting youth to accept the well-intentioned “dare” to leave their comfort zones, take risks, and fail, we must do the work of preparing them to handle the possible consequences of these actions.
Challenging youth to take risks without preparation to handle undesired outcomes is like expecting a skydiver to jump out of a plane without a parachute.
We might judge youth who choose to remain in their comfort zones as unfit for leadership, but it is actually smart for a skydiver without a parachute to stay in the plane. When youth refuse to jump, we must ask ourselves if it is because we have not equipped them to jump. Have I done the work of mentoring my youth so that they know the risk won’t ruin them? We must do the work of giving youth their parachutes before encouraging them to step out of their comfort zones--let alone jump. The “parachute” consists of critical truths that Christian youth must learn about their Christian identity to prepare for a lifetime of “jumping” into leadership.
“I can afford to fail.”
The first critical truth that Christian youth must learn is: "I can afford to fail." Most youth will not risk failure because they are too insecure to believe that they can afford to fail. If we are honest, we would admit that failure is sometimes too costly even for us as adults. This is why many parents (inadvertently) send the opposite message to their kids: “You need to succeed.” In other words, “You need to succeed because we cannot afford to fail.” Deep inside, many parents do not really believe that they can handle their child’s failure. And youth can sense this. To avoid disappointing parents and themselves, youth choose to protect themselves and their parents by passing up opportunities to fail (AKA, opportunities to learn). When you cannot afford to fail, the need to succeed quickly disqualifies participation in any situation in which failure is possible.
Success Is Not An Identity
How can youth (and we) afford to fail? We can afford to fail when we don’t stake our identities on our successes. Why do we stake our identities on our successes? Because we are insecure without our accomplishments. Insecurity is an extremely effective motivator that drives us to do many things that we believe once accomplished will give us a sense of security about who we are. So, insecure parents inadvertently pressure their insecure children to “succeed” so that both will feel better about themselves. Can we see the tragic, cyclical psychosis in this kind of thinking?
If we are not to stake our identities on our successes, then what do we stake them on?
Jesus. Of course! We remember the Gospel truth that frees us from having to accomplish and achieve in order to feel good about ourselves. We can feel good about ourselves because Jesus loves us. He loves us so much that He voluntarily came to not only die in our places, but also live in our places, which fulfilled our obligation to keep God's Law perfectly. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says, “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Because Jesus LIVED for us, His perfect life fulfills our need to live a perfect life.
Both Christian parents and youth need this good news every day: Jesus's perfect, successful life earned our successful lives. Thus, we place our security, significance, and self-worth in Jesus's successes instead of our own. Then we are credited with His perfection and righteousness, and this imputed reality makes us a "new creation," and gives us a new identity.
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! ...God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor. 5:17, 21, NIV)
Because our new identity in Christ is our true, spiritual, emotional, physical reality all the time--regardless of our performance--we can always afford to fail. Thus, Jesus’s perfect life accomplished for us is our parachute. Once we find our significance in Jesus’s perfect life instead of ours, we are equipped and secure--enough to jump out of the proverbial plane. Since our significance and identities are separate from our performance in life, we can freely, safely take risks, try things, see what happens, fail. We are free even to succeed, because our sense of significance is separate from our successes. Although we can rarely feel it, the truth we grasp by faith is: Our successes and failures have NO bearing whatsoever on our worth, value, and importance as people.
Rooting our identity and security in Christ, and not in anything we do, is how we can afford to fail.
In Christ, there is no unnecessary pressure to succeed because our self-worth does not depend on our success. But until we empower youth with the truth of their self-worth in Christ, it is unreasonable to expect them to risk what they believe they cannot afford to lose. By first educating them about their new, true identity in Christ, we can empower youth to take on the leadership challenges that are set before them.
*The Search for Significance by Robert S. McGee (Thomas Nelson, 2003)
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Brenda Jung is the founder of WeLead, a Christian organization that empowers youth with lifelong leadership values, skills, habits, mindsets, and mentorship throughout their middle and high school years. She can be reached via email to [email protected].
For more information about the next 12-week Youth Leadership Mastermind & Mentorship session for youth that begins on January 3, 2022, visit www.weleadthis.com/membership.
