How To Experience Success When Things Go Wrong
Most of us have some awareness of the future that is in us. You know what I mean – those moments when we briefly glimpse possibilities that are even better than our past or our present.
Here’s something I’ve discovered that I want to share with you: We can become fully awake to this future. We can move the glimpses of possibilities towards reality. We can move mystery toward the intentional.
We can partner with God to create the tomorrow He has dreamed for us – the future we were made for. We can create our God-inspired futures.
God-inspired futures are futures that are better, best, preferred. But God does not force these futures on us. He allows us to choose whether to actualize them, and when we do, we can experience more and more of what He made in the beginning, before terrible human choices messed everything up.
I want this preferred future God planned for each of us and for those we love. I’m not only referring to future generations – I am talking about imminent futures that we can all witness sooner rather than later.
But here’s where so many of us falter:
We forget that, though a preferred future is in each of us, it takes courage to bring it into existence. It takes action.
I often think about great examples like the Wright Brothers, who created a machine that brilliant minds had previously only dreamed of.
Of course in the present age, entire economies revolve around the successful aviation industry. But long before that realization, the road to fulfilling the brothers’ dream was filled with disappointments and failures.
They literally crashed and burned over and over.
As I discovered reading David McCullough’s biography of these brothers, their courage and perseverance were on another level. These two preachers’ sons – simple machine shop owners – had a dream that would change the world and nothing could stop them from bringing that dream to pass. But it took years to bring that dream to reality. It took years of constant investment and risk and courageous action. Despite the frequent setbacks, they kept getting back up and kept getting better and kept trying to fly.
I think it's safe to say that they kept their courage in spite of apparent failure.
Like the journey of those courageous brothers, the road to our preferred futures will also include crashes and burns and failures. But if we are going to get there, we are going to have to keep our courage.
We are all created in God's image and therefore we each have the ability to create new realities, to actualize preferred futures. But it takes courage to get from where we are to where we could be.
Remember, courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is facing our fear and moving forward in our lives. It takes courage to know that you will face adversity but nothing can keep you from moving forward in your life. It takes courage to move from idea to reality, to move from possibility to practicality and to move from expectation to giving birth to a thing.
And sometimes it takes courage to just hang in there.
To never give up.
To just keep trying.
To get back up and keep moving forward.
When we commit to this, I have no doubt we’ll encounter success, which is a constant movement toward a God- dreamed future. I define success like this:
“Success is the process of accomplishing those things for which we were destined in a way that honors God, loves people and brings joy.”
The very nature of success is three steps forward and two steps back. One step forward. One step back. Five steps forward. Two steps back. That's a lot of forwards and backs. But if you do the math, that's cumulatively four steps forward. And in my book that is called success. Just keep moving forward.
But it’s this very back-and-forth nature of the journey to success that makes courage a non-negotiable ingredient.
We will face difficulty and challenges. It’s a guarantee.
What will we do? We will just keep moving forward, towards our God-inspired futures.