Failure or success?

Here's a great post I found four years ago. I intended to use it as a springboard to write a blog post from, but never did. I have dozens of such links sitting in draft blog posts, a bit neater than a crafter's to do cupboard or room, but still could use some attention. 

Probably most overseas workers struggle with a feeling of a certain level of failure. I certainly do, in much more pervasive way than I've ever experienced in Australia. Japanese language is my achilles heel and the enemy is very quick to attack me on this point. In the last couple of years I've also struggled against a sense of personal failure in parenting.

Why are we quick to judge ourselves? And why do we choose results as the litmus test? Maybe because it's easier to say "an A is success, a D is not"? Is that something that school drove into us? Maybe, but I think it's human nature to want simple measures of what success vs failure is. And an A-E scale, or percentage scale is easy. Being able to put people (ourselves) into boxes is easy—that's why we love personality measures like introvert-extrovert, Myers Briggs, and Enneagrams. 

Dealing with messy is much harder. It's easy to make the false jump from "my child learned to read early" to "I'm a successful parent". Or from "I have this degree and a job" to "I'm a successful person". Or from "I have good Japanese" to "I'm a successful missionary".

It's much harder to know what to think about the child who struggles to learn, the young adult who—for whatever reason—struggles to live independently, or the missionary whose attempts to learn the language or to do evangelism appears to lack any results.

I think we often judge ourselves more harshly that we judge other people, simply because we know more about ourselves and the unspoken fears and insecurities that others don't know, or don't know the full depth of it. 

For example, I know the depths of my language inabilities, but most others don't. I remember the day that, at a meeting with our mission, we had a Japanese speaker and they offered translation for anyone who wanted it. I'd long "graduated" from full-time language study but knew that I wasn't going to be able to understand this important topic in Japanese. Because our mission values good language, the pressure to not join the translation group was huge (it was mostly for short termer and new workers). I did join it in the end, but got some funny looks from some of my colleagues.

I can't look sideways or even internally for affirmation of who I am and what I do. I need to look upwards to God, who made me just as I am. I like how the writer of the article I linked to at the start finishes her article, with this prayer:

God,
You know me. The life and talents you’ve given me are no mistake; they are not too much or too little. You know my fears, difficulties, and disappointments. It’s true that I would love success, but even more than that, I want to be found faithful with what you have given me. I want to be pleasing to you.
Amen.