I find that depression and sorrow are about me and available to me all the time. It is so easy to focus on failure and the inability to be great or even good (or, to be honest, at least not to be bad). Envy is a common struggle with the inability to be as we perceive others are, or might be. Comparison can be a tool for learning or a weapon for destruction.

Each of us has the ability to thank Jesus that He will use failings, real or perceived, to benefit us as individuals and others, no matter how terrible those failures might seem. He redeems the worst and turns it into something useful. He is the hero that is greater than anything the comic books can imagine.. He is the hero who is working to rescue and redeem each of us during our lowest points of failure, and every other point of our lives. I can always praise Jesus because while I am failing, I am His, and He is succeeding.

Failure is just fertilizer for the next garden Jesus plans to grow in our lives. Those gardens are places of healing for us and others. Failure is not a deterrent to God’s victory. It may even be a spur. My favorite stories are things the Lord has overcome in my life. Distressed students would pull me aside to talk. They wanted to hear about a time that something painful in my life was transformed because it gave them hope and built faith.

Testimonies abound throughout the Christian brotherhood. Where do those testimonies begin? They begin in someone’s failure. All the encouragement we receive in the faith typically come from Jesus’s success in, over, or through someone’s failure. We are fallen humans in a fallen world, but Jesus is not. He told his disciples, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”” John 16:33 ESV

We don’t need to be preoccupied with making ourselves look good for others. That is really only a pretense at best. We can be preoccupied with thanksgiving and praise for the victor who has chosen to give us a victory we can not achieve ourselves. 

Our testimony, God’s victory in the midst of our failure, is proof of His love, power, and commitment to us as individuals and corporately. It is proof that He is reaching out to everyone with the lifeboat of His salvation. It is proof that there is nothing God can’t overcome, and no one God is unwilling to save. 

We carry within us, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, the proof of Jesus’s love and salvation. Every day, in every way, the transformative love of Jesus is working in our lives for our freedom, even when we struggle against Him. I am not ashamed of the gospel can mean that I’m not ashamed about how much I need Jesus as much as it is being totally awed by what Jesus has done and is doing. We are tied to His grace through the unbreakable power of His gift to us. He is worthy of all praise and thanksgiving.