Strategy for victory: failure

Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic won 43 straight matches over a period of six months before losing to Roger Federer in the French Open in June.

This amazing series of wins, against the best players in the world, rocked the sport of tennis. But it was the loss, and a string of bitter defeats last year during a self-described personal “crisis,” that set the stage for Djokovic’s greatest triumph to date: his first Wimbledon championship. He beat defending champion Rafael Nadal July 3 in convincing style on the sport’s biggest stage.

“[L]osing that really epic semifinal against Federer — a great match — I managed to recover and to come back … and to win Wimbledon for the first time in my life,” Djokovic told reporters.

Winning is great, but losing helps you get better — if you learn from your mistakes. Any good athlete or coach will tell you the same. Compete with bigger, faster, better players, they advise. Pay the price of losing repeatedly in order to gain the skills to win.

Wise parents and teachers instill the same approach to life in children. “Helicopter parents” who anxiously hover, terrified their kids will stub their toes or not get into the school play, are only ensuring greater failure down the road. If you don’t fail once in a while, you don’t grow. And you fear taking on something really challenging.

Churches, ministry organizations and mission teams often make the same mistake. They stick to the script, the proven program, the best practice. But some brave soul has to discover for the first time what works, usually by repeated failures.

Pastor/author Rick Warren reminds leaders at his church “that they have my permission to make at least one mistake a week,” he wrote in a 2004 Baptist Press column. “I don’t want [them] to fall into sloppy habits, but I do want them to feel free to fail because that means they’ll also feel free to take risks! My point is that if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re probably not trying anything new. And if you’re not trying anything new, then you’re not learning, and if you’re not learning, then you and your ministry will quickly be out of date, perhaps even irrelevant. The secret to being innovative is not being afraid to fail.”

It’s also the secret of faith, Warren added. The unprofitable servant in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-29) was also the unfaithful one. He took no risks with the money his master gave him. Peter, on the other hand, recklessly stepped out of the boat to walk toward Jesus on the stormy sea (Matthew 14:22-31). He began to fail, to sink. His faith was small. But it was greater than that of the other terrified disciples huddling in the boat.

Every business and management book published in the last 25 years probably has a chapter titled “Freedom to fail” or something similar. It sounded great — until the U.S. economy failed spectacularly in 2008 because of foolish risks taken in Washington and on Wall Street. Now investors fear spending their money on new ventures. Businesses hesitate to hire new workers. The economy will never truly recover, however, until people in a position to change things risk failure and show some faith in the future.

“At this point, freedom to fail probably ranks right around freedom to remove your own appendix,” observed business writer Megan McArdle in a recent article for TIME magazine (“In Defense of Failure”).

“That’s a pity, because failure is one of the most economically important tools we have,” McArdle wrote. “The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate failure; it should be to build a system resilient enough to withstand it. … The real secret of our success is that we learn from the past, and then we forget it. Unfortunately, we’re dangerously close to forgetting the most important lessons of our own history: how to fail gracefully and how to get back on our feet with equal grace.”

Too many organizations, however, insist on punishing failure.

“I once taught a workshop in a large organization and included an activity where I asked the delegates to think of the ‘second right answer’ to a problem,” says Mark McGuinness, who coaches organizational creativity. “They looked like rabbits caught in the headlights. When I asked them what was wrong, they told me they were always expected to come up with the right answer and were severely punished for making mistakes. No prizes for guessing how creative they were. And yet — when they relaxed a little — they showed me they were perfectly capable of thinking creatively. It was the fear of punishment that stopped them from using this ability at work.

“People and companies that succeed through innovation take a very different approach to failure. They accept it, or even encourage it, because they know that failure holds the key to success. … Encourage people to try new things and learn from their inevitable mistakes. Reward them for being open and honest about mistakes and failures — so that these are not swept under the carpet, causing even more problems. If you’re going to punish anything, punish failure to learn. If you don’t, the market will.”

Are you listening, ministry leaders? Disciple makers model how to follow the Lord, just as Christ did with the Twelve. He sent them out two by two, let them learn the hard way (see Peter and the boat) and patiently taught them day by day. I’ve lost count of the number of Christian leaders I’ve seen sabotage their own ministries by refusing to allow their followers to grow through failure.

If you want hundreds of examples of victory coming through failure, defeat, loss and despair, read the Bible. The ultimate “failure” of all time was the shameful death of Jesus at the hands of those who misunderstood and rejected Him.

It resulted in eternal victory over death itself.

Fatima's story

Listen to an audio version of this post at
http://media1.imbresources.org/files/67/6726/6726-37950.mp3

I still think about Fatima, a 15-year-old girl who almost became a perishable product.

She ran to greet us five years ago at a Christian shelter in north India — a safe place for women and children rescued from slavery, forced prostitution and human traffickers.

Her smile shone as brightly as her yellow sari. She was learning to read and sew, to sing and laugh. She recited the Lord’s Prayer by heart and was getting to know the One who taught it. She didn’t go to bed hungry anymore. She knew someone cared whether she lived or died.

Fatima’s father pulled a rickshaw in Kolkata (Calcutta). She never went to school. When she reached age 6, her abusive stepmother forced her to start cooking and cleaning for the rest of the family. She also worked cutting rubber to make sandals — one rupee (about 2 cents) for 12 straps.

When Fatima was 14, her stepmother took her to a “youth hostel” and left her there. It turned out to be a brothel.

When her first customer came to her room, Fatima hit him on the head with a hard-soled shoe and fled. She walked 20 kilometers to the main train station in Kolkata. A child protective agency found her there and sent her by train to the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On arrival she was taken to the Christian shelter.

“She was very tense and afraid,” recalled the shelter director. “She shouted, ‘Leave me alone!’ She thought she was being brought to another brothel.” But Fatima was among friends at last.

If only every child in her position could find such a sanctuary.

Human trafficking is a business. More to the point in these brutal economic times, it’s a very profitable business. Like any other business, it has employers and employees, buyers and sellers, supply and demand.

The only difference: The products of this business are people — like Fatima, who was about to be consumed when she jumped off the shelf and escaped.

These human products are bought and sold, used and abused via prostitution, pornography, “entertainment,” slavery, forced labor and other forms of exploitation. When they reach their “use-by” date, the industry tosses them aside and goes after new inventory.

That’s the case in north India, one of the biggest crossroads of human trafficking. Beset by too many mouths to feed, poor villagers often sell young daughters outright to sex traffickers, who turn a profit by selling them to urban brothels.

When I visited the region in 2003, traffickers could buy a village girl from neighboring Nepal for 10,000 rupees (about $200 at the time) and sell her in Delhi for up to 60,000 rupees ($1,200) — “depending on her color, texture and size,” according to a local observer.

Sometimes, parents “mortgage” a daughter for a few years. By the time they save enough to redeem her, “she has suffered a lot,” said a local Christian leader who fights the sex trade.

“These girls usually start around age 14,” he said. “By the time they are 18 or 19, they’re finished” — exhausted, brutalized, infected with AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, turned out on the street to beg or starve.

Between 12 million and 27 million people worldwide are involved in some type of forced servitude, according to various estimates.
Up to 800,000 are trafficked across international borders each year – the majority being women and children swept up into the sex trade.

Lest we think it’s all “over there” somewhere, more than 14,000 foreign nationals are imported annually into sexual or domestic/sweatshop slavery in our own land of the free, according to U.S. government statistics. An estimated 200,000 American children, meanwhile, are “at risk for trafficking into the sex industry,” reports the U.S. Department of Justice.

Recent investigations of the growth of globe-spanning organized crime syndicates miss the true magnitude of “how far people themselves have become merchandise, as indentured laborers, domestic slaves, child thieves, child soldiers, child prostitutes, babies for sale … and organ suppliers,” writes Peter Robb in The New York Times. “All move around the world with the collusion of customs, immigration, police, social services, charities and aid agencies.”

Bear in mind, also, that human trafficking is only the third-largest criminal enterprise on a global scale. Drug dealing and illegal arms trafficking are even bigger operations. And the United States is the world’s largest recreational drug market, with Mexico being one of its largest suppliers.

That’s why civilians reportedly ran a higher risk — more than three times higher, per capita — of being killed last year in the Mexican border city of Juarez than in Baghdad, Iraq. Out of a population of 1.6 million, some 1,800 people were gunned down in 2008 in Juarez, where heavily armed drug gangs battle police and government forces in broad-daylight shootouts for access to key entry points to the United States.

Many evangelical Christians have become passionately involved in fighting human trafficking and other global evils through education, social action and legislation. That is in the best tradition of biblical justice.

But it’s not enough.

Laws, no matter how aggressively enforced, cannot change hearts. Nations that tolerate or participate in the buying and selling of human beings need something more fundamental. They need spiritual transformation — and we must seek it on their behalf through the transforming power of the Gospel.

That’s what William Wilberforce preached as a follower of Christ and an impassioned supporter both of missions and social change, even as he fought successfully as a member of Parliament to end the slave trade in the British Empire.

“Evil and injustice are rampant in our world today; carnal values and immorality are pervasive in our own society and throughout the world,” writes International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin in his new book, Spiritual Warfare: the Battle for God’s Glory (B&H Books, 2009; order at http://imbresources.org/).

However, the notion that human evil has somehow grown beyond God’s power to defeat it, Rankin warns, “is not biblical and clearly demeans who God is and His power. It also dismisses the victory Christ has won on the cross and God’s redemptive activity as irrelevant.”

If the Lord’s declaration in Psalm 46:10 is true, He promises: “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

That includes India, the United States, Mexico and every other nation that is robbing Him of His glory today.