Few things in life are certain, but one of the certainties of life is this: we will make mistakes. We will make a lot of mistakes. Early in life we often feel guilty and ashamed of our mistakes, perhaps thinking that we are the only ones who make them. As we grow older, however, we see that making mistakes – messing things up and failure – is part of life for everyone. While mistakes are not to be sought out, they are not the end of the story.

Mistakes are to be learned from and grown out of. They are opportunities for us to sheepishly, maybe, and humbly, definitively, turn back to God in search of the forgiveness or strength that will inevitably await us and help us to move on along a better path. One of the best lines in the New Testament dealing with failure comes in the story of the Prodigal Son, or the Forgiving Father as it is increasingly known. When the wayward son, who has really messed up, comes back to his father seeking forgiveness for his mistakes we read the following about the father’s reaction to the son: ‘He fell on his neck and kissed him.’

How wonderful to have a God who falls on our neck and kisses us when we mess up and ask for his forgiveness! And what better way to be his presence in the world than to do the same for others in our lives?  Bring to mind the often unpleasant experience of failure, sit with it, try to find an image that captures it for you.  Admit your vulnerability in the face of this experience. Acknowledge that you need God’s help: make it real, not just asking a remote God but pleading with a living, breathing, concerned and compassionate God. Make your own petition of what you need in your own words: ‘God,’ for example, ‘I really messed it up this time, I really can’t cope and I desperately need some help.’ Feel the weight of your need or desire in your words.

Picture Jesus on the Cross and try to connect emotionally with his awful pain and Passion, his whole project having failed, his friends having turned against him, having been betrayed by a friend, and abandoned by all but a few. He found a way though, abandoning himself to God (using the words of the Psalms: ‘Into your hands O Lord’), by being faithful in prayer and believing against all odds that the power of God transformed this situation. All the violence, evil and hatred was transformed into forgiveness and compassion; death or disaster was not the end; in fact, it was a new beginning.
Use your imagination to hand over your failure to Jesus to have it transformed; it takes complete trust and commitment.

1. What have been the moments of apparent failure in my life?
2. How would a compassionate God look on those?
3. What healing and forgiveness do I have to pray for?