The other day, God was very clear with me about discipleship in my life. As He spoke to me, I wrote down this statement:
Our fears are a significant threat to the discipleship movement of God.
I could give you a list a mile long of the fears that have held me back from discipleship for many years. These fears have basically kept me from living out the Great Commission in so many ways. And fear of failure has always been the biggest factor.
How many times have we heard “Failure is not an option”? (As if that is supposed to be a motivating factor in anything we do.) “Whatever you do, don’t fail.”
Is that crazy to anyone else?
A few years back, while I participated in training for churches developing discipleship and missional communities, I heard this quote: “If it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
The teacher said it, and you could hear a collective pause among the participants as it sank in. Although the quote originally comes from G.K. Chesterton, and it didn’t originally have to anything to do with discipleship, a thread of truth runs through it and causes quite a reaction among church leaders today.
In that moment, I heard that I had permission to fail.
The revolutionary thought was that discipleship didn’t always have to go perfectly for it to be purposeful.
My immediate reaction was, “So you mean to say that I don’t have to think of myself as being good at something before I start doing it?”
That rocked my paradigm because I had so many discipleship failures under my belt at that point. I couldn’t believe that any of them could add up to being worth something. I had enough failure racked up by then that I told myself I wouldn’t do it anymore. I was done putting myself out there, done giving my time and energy to women only to find them continuously not calling me back after a few months.
As a part of this learning community, one of our assignments was to read Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. The entire book is devoted to the study of success and how much of it has to do with opportunity. His research and observations led to a lot of interesting findings, but the one that struck all of us was the idea it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any arena.
That’s when the light bulb comes on.
