Failure is an option

Early in the fall, I challenged my Southeast students to come up with a word found in the pages of the New Testament that resonated with each of them.

Most of my charges are traditional, which, in the parlance of the university, means they're between the ages of 18 and 22.

It was a nontraditional student, though, an older one, who came up with the most intriguing offering -- fail.

"Fail" appears 63 times in the Bible, with 10 occurrences in the New Testament -- nearly all of the latter attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.

I won't disclose anything further about the student in question, save to say she was vulnerable and expansive about the times in her life where she had failed and where others had failed her.

Astronaut Jim Lovell commanded Apollo 13, the doomed 1970 mission to the moon -- a journey thwarted by an oxygen tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth.

In the splendid Ron Howard film about the successful return of the three astronauts, NASA flight director Gene Kranz is heard to utter the words, "Failure is not an option."

Never mind Kranz never spoke those words half a century ago.

When a screenwriter decided to use the sentence in the movie, Kranz liked the phrase so much he made it the title of his 2000 autobiography.

In the days when the U.S. was regularly going into space, astronauts trained over and over on all the possible "what if" scenarios.

No one in NASA thought anything could go wrong in a routine stirring of the oxygen tanks, yet it did, and only herculean efforts got those men home safely.

There was, however, a failure to imagine every scenario, a lack of respect for the notion that if something can go wrong, it probably will.

I've failed plenty in life and how I've failed is, forgive the cutting nature of this, none of your business.

Just as how you may have come up short in your time on Earth is no business of mine.

Failing, I've discovered, as hard as it is in real time, can be instructive.

Failure, in my mind, is a better teacher than success.

Former Cape Mayor and local banker Jay B. Knudtson alluded to this truth when he gave the SEMO commencement address in December 2018 and told the soon-to-be-graduates, a group including himself, that at age 55, he was not a good student or test taker and did not possess a very good memory.

Do it anyway, Knudtson suggested. Try anyway.

The most important line of Knudtson's remarks that day, which may constitute his favorite business philosophy, is "control the controllables."

There is a certain wisdom in the phrase, one seared into a soul by the hard process of trying, failing and getting up and trying again.

This column could be laden with examples of failure eventually resulting in success.

Thomas Edison, whose teachers -- in what may be an apocryphal comment -- said "he was too stupid to learn anything," is said to have made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to invent the light bulb before it worked.

Henry Ford, inventor of the Model-T automobile and who revolutionized manufacturing by using mass, rather than unit, production -- went broke five times.

Albert Einstein's parents called him abnormal and teachers in his native Switzerland once described him as 'mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams." In response: E=MC squared.

Jesus' family once thought something might be very wrong with the second person of the Trinity, the Savior of the world.

A cursory reading of the New Testament reveals family concern that the first-born of Mary had become an itinerant, traveling the countryside with a band of followers -- teaching, healing and performing miracles -- rather than practicing carpentry and earning a proper living.

In other words, it might be said Mary and Jesus' brothers thought Jesus was failing.

The shortest gospel, Mark, tells a riveting story shortly after the Master called his disciples.

"He went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.' And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, 'He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of demons he casts out demons.' And (Jesus) called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, 'How can Satan cast out Satan'?" (Mark 3:19b-23/NRSV)

In what may be the most massive understatement of my writing career, let me suggest Jesus turned out all right.

Jesus didn't fail, but his family was worried. They were wrong.

Jesus didn't fail when Rome ordered his execution via crucifixion. Some at the time may have accepted the idea if the state kills you, then you must be a criminal of some sort. They were wrong.

Failure is always an option, particularly when it results in long-lasting success.