Enjoyed this blog from Al Andrews. Parent: How are you teaching your child to lose well? What do you say/do when they lose? Sports Minister: What are you doing to teach children in your ministry to lose well? Do you have a good definition of what that means?
I love to succeed and I want my sons to succeed as well. In soccer, school, and in various projects, I’ve always wanted them to win. If you think about it, there are a lot of books out there that encourage me in this line of thought. “Live your best life!” “Raise good kids” “You can be victorious.” and on and on and on. But there’s not much talk about losing, failure, and messing up – where frankly much of my life is lived.
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I mess things up daily. I fail my friends, my wife, and my kids. I forget to put air in my tires and the tread wears down. I miss a payment and get a nasty call from the electric company. I got a letter last week from the homeowners association because I violated a neighborhood rule regarding trashcans. The list goes on and on, and ranges from mild to serious. And until the motorcycle course where my failure was displayed in living color, I’d kept most of those kinds of things under wraps, deferring to my more successful moments.
I think I’m going to change my ways. People have plenty of models for success. Successful folks tend to give seminars, write books about how to get there, and they eventually end up on Oprah. I’m going to have more conversations about what I’ve not done right, ways I’ve messed up, where I’ve failed and how I’ve found my way through it.
Because that’s where God comes alongside me and says, “I love failures – people who can’t make it, folks who trip and fall, prodigal men and women who stumble toward me, hungry and dirty, having made a mess of things. Those are the people who need me – who need mercy, who need grace, who need my embrace because life is hard.”
