The Spiritual Value of Risk & Failure — Kyle Stoltzfus — Ep. 184

Our guest for this episode is Kyle Stosfuss. Kyle was an instructor at Faith Builders Educational Programs, a father of four, and a pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church. Kyle, what theological premises do you bring to the way that you think about risk and failure? I'm by nature the kind of person who's kind of risk averse. So part of what I'm outlining here isn't trying to describe who I am, but this is a pathway that, at least for me, has been significant in helping me to grow to appreciate risk and failure. The theological premises.

This is the central theological premise when you're talking about risk and failure. It's a, "There is a God. I'm not Him. Thank God for that." Here's what I'm going for for that. At first, just a little bit of reflection, saying this is theology. We're reflecting on who God is.

We're reflecting on who humans are. I'm assuming that you and I, as humans, or just humans in general, when we enter the world, we enter the world incomplete. That is, in some ways, we're good, but we're not whole yet. We haven't learned language. We haven't learned how to tie our shoes or blow our nose or play tennis. And all of those things that might be possibilities in our future, they're there in some ways as potentials, but they haven't been developed yet. So for humans to develop into being the kinds of beings that do worthwhile things, like blowing our noses and tying our shoes and playing tennis, much less the really, really important parts of our lives, like loving well, like we talked about community a little while back, like forming community, these are really complicated things to do.

And to learn to do those things well, we're going to have to learn. And to learn, I'm assuming this. To learn means we're going to have to fail. We're going to have to try and not do it right the first time. It's especially true of the really worthwhile things in life. You're going to have to try. You're going to fail. To keep on learning, you're going to have to see failure as part of that process, which means sometimes you'll have to risk as well. Okay? That's the human side. We'll have to learn. To learn, we have to fail. To continue learning, if you failed, you're going to have to risk. It's a capacity you're going to have to develop.

There's a second part to the statement. That's us. The second part that a Christian has is understanding what the nature of God is like, which helps us to enter into that ability to take risks, to fail. And that's something like this.

For the Christian, God delights in taking the malformed and the unformed and making something more whole and something good out of it. And that's how God is portrayed at the start of Scripture. He speaks matter into existence, but it's not fully formed yet.

And in the first chapters of the Bible, you see this intimate and beautiful picture of God who creates matter and then works with it. He forms it. He manipulates that unformed and kind of chaotic matter and transforms it into something that he says is good. At the same time that Genesis author is going to lengths to describe a God who is not the same thing as his creation.

He puts in place the firmament. And you realize that when God speaks the firmament into existence, he's not the firmament, so don't worship it. He speaks the lights into existence, the stars, the sun, the moon. And you realize that these things are good. They're how God has ordered the world to be, and they're blessed that way. But at the same time, they're not the same thing as God. And the author is going to lengths to, belows, embrace the created order as it is, but also to differentiate God from that. Okay? So to catch that all, you've got a picture of a God, the God. He delights in forming the chaotic and the unformed into something beautiful, but he's also separate from all of those things.

Here's one beautiful part of that. It could be kind of scary. God is not the same thing as his creation. He's not a pagan god. This is one of the ways that Christians and biblical writers have celebrated that throughout the centuries, throughout the millennia. They've taken that to mean that God, because he's different from his creation, he can interact with the world freely. He can interact with the world resourcefully. He can interact with the world on his terms in ways that are consistent with who he is as a creator, as a redeemer. And as you move through the Bible, that's how God's people celebrate the creator God.

They tend to look at his resourcefulness and his creativity at the very beginning, and then they look at their circumstances. They look at the challenges they're facing. They look at the opportunities that they have. They're looking at the very real risks that are pressuring them right then. And they start to talk then about God's creation of the world. It's like they're overlaying God's rich and free resourcefulness on their difficulties, especially through in the Psalms. It's beautiful in Isaiah and Jeremiah. It's all throughout the Bible. And it's almost like they're saying, almost like they're reminding themselves, "Oh, you know I have this challenge. I've got this opportunity. I'm going to offer the little bit that I know to offer God, this little sacrifice of praise, this little sacrifice of obedience that I have.

I'm going to offer that, understanding that it's small, understanding that it's finite, understanding that I might fail, freely acknowledging, 'I don't know where this is going to go. I don't know the outcome to all of this.' But I'm offering it as a sacrifice of worship to a free and resourceful God who can make something out of that." He originated the world from nothing, they say. He ordered the entire world. And because that's who God is, he can make something out of the little sacrifice that I offer into this challenge, into this risk I feel like I've got to take into whatever circumstance it is that they're facing right then. There's the two premises in the engine room that God is God.

We are not. We, God's human creatures, we are fallible and we're finite. We make mistakes. We take risks sometimes, but we serve a free and a creative and a resourceful God who actually is, he has a very long history, about as long as the world, of taking chaotic and uncertain things and making them creative and beautiful.

So that opens a pathway for us to venture into the uncertain, to embrace freely the reality that we don't actually understand all the outcomes and leave growth and increase up to God. I think that intuitively many of us see risk and failure as a bad thing.

So what's your framework for seeing possible value in it? We are just by nature, it seems, protective creatures of ourselves. And our culture, speaking kind of generally, is pretty risk averse, pretty risk avoidant. We have whole industries that are about managing risk, and we have whole sectors of people who are about recognizing patterns of risk and failure and trying to make predictable outcomes. So the people who tend to be celebrated in our world today are the ones who know now how to manage risk and drive it toward predictable outcomes. I would be at least suggesting here that, say, the folks in Hebrews 11, we could see as being on the wrong side of history if that's the only way we had to think about risk.

These were people of faith. In the immediate sense, in the sense that was apparent right away, they were failures. And then they're reflected on in Scripture as being these anchors of faith for us. So I have a number, there's a number of things bearing in. I'm not going to try to reconcile all of them. I think that first, that we as Christians, we have to think about risk and failure from the starting point of the cross. Before the resurrection, before the resurrection of Jesus, that is, it seemed as though Jesus had made some risky obediences, and maybe he'd miscalculated a little bit, and he's crushed under the foot of Rome and with the power of Jerusalem aligning with that.

That seems like failure. However, when Jesus rose, God revealed, among other things, he revealed that nothing like what Jesus offered is ever going to be wasted. That sacrificial love that he offered isn't wasted. That risky obedience isn't wasted. A cup of cooled water is going to have a reward. And that sometimes a few coins that are thrown into the offering is going to have more of an effect in the way the world operates than a whole mint that's put in publicly. That's one aspect. Another aspect is that if we're going to learn to incorporate and own our failures, which is a significant way that we grow, if we're going to do that, we've got to find a way of confessing them, of learning them, of actually having ownership of them.

And the beautiful thing about God, who is different than his creation, who's not the same thing, is that he can interrupt the cycles of cause and effect that we think determine our failure. He can interrupt those in surprising ways if we're willing to own them, if we're willing to say, "Yeah, that was my failure. That was my sin." If we own them and bring them to him, he can do some kind of surprising things with them. A third aspect, and I'm going back toward the human side here, was Chesterton, I think, who said, "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." That is, again, to say that there are things like writing letters to people that we love or blowing our nose, which if we want to get good at them, we'll have to do poorly at first.

And that's especially true of the more and more complex things that we have in life, which are increasingly worthwhile. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly at first. Chesterton's not excusing poor performance there. He's just saying you're going to have to get there over time. You'll try first. It won't look great. You'll try again. You'll learn something, and you'll keep on going as you go. Another way to say this that I've kind of enjoyed, if at first you succeed, what you've accomplished is probably insignificant.

That's another way of saying, like, if you get it right the first time, well, good job, but that really didn't ask much virtue of you. That really didn't demand very much courage. You weren't risking anything. You probably didn't achieve anything really that great after all. It's a fourth aspect on the end, and this one's the briefest from Jeremiah 17:5. Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. I just mentioned that risk and failure are good vehicles to getting us toward trust in the Lord and away from trust in ourselves very quickly. If you want to learn how to do that fast, try failing a few times, and you quickly learn to trust in the Lord.

That's the hope anyway. There's a way in which that's reassuring. But I'm curious, how can this perspective that you're offering play into or be a factor for those who are confronting big decisions where it seems like failure or something going wrong is a possible outcome?

It's just true. It's just true that life doesn't wait around for us to decide. Life isn't waiting for us to get all of our thinking straightened out. And then it's like, okay, you can hit pause, figure it out. And after you've figured it out and processed things adequately, you can start going against that.

In many ways, how life works, it's fired at us point blank. Some decisions we make have to be made under pressure while the conditions continue to change, while things move on. And that puts pressure on us. That's stressful. And the outcome isn't going to be really reassured in some of those times. I think I'm just quite certain that God's will in this situation always includes an element of uncertainty. There's always an element there of risk. If you could eliminate all risk, you would have just made faith obsolete. That's not the point. Our trust isn't in our ability to figure it all out. So there's always going to be a part of our lives where risk is just, I think, required of us.

And I think God actually places us in those situations so we can learn how to trust. And just because we're trusting doesn't mean we can predict the outcomes with total certainty. At the same time, I don't think that means that we shouldn't count the costs or surround ourselves with discerning people. When Jesus was tempted by the devil, one of the temptations that the devil had for him was he placed him up on top of the temple. And he's like, "Okay, now you want to show me how faithful you really are. You want to show the people how much God is committed to you as his son. Why don't you jump from the temple?" And Jesus rebuked the devil, and he responded, "You should not tempt the Lord your God."

I'm just saying that Jesus there, he wasn't going to test the Lord by saying, "I'm going to take a leap here, Lord. I'm going to take a risk and catch me if you want to prove to me, if you want to prove to the people around me that you're actually my God." That's testing the Lord.

Jesus does not recommend that, and neither should we recommend that. That's fideism. That's not faith, if you want to make the technical distinction there. But I think this way of approaching risk, this way of approaching failure, this hope in it because of who God is, what it does do is it means that costly choices sometimes they're inevitable. And we just have to face that. And they're inevitable, and we're going to face them with limited resources as humans. We don't just become infallible. We don't become infinite. That's who God is.

We're still his creatures. So these are still parts of who we are, but they're also parts of, they're also an important way of how God helps us to grow up. We're tested. We have our limits. We have to make real choices. And there's the real chance that there's going to be mistakes. But when we celebrate a God who's resourceful, who's free, who's competent, our mistakes, our limitedness, they're not barriers. They're not barriers to his work in our lives, and they're not barriers to the progress of his work in the world or his mission in the world. So God, he's capable. He's capable of taking the unformed parts of our lives. He's capable of taking the places where we've made a risk.

We've pushed out beyond where it is that we're able to actually predict the outcome. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. We can't factor all those things in. We have a God who's capable of making something out of those. And because of that, I'm suggesting we can enter those choices with not only joy, but even some sense of abandonment. And that's a beautiful picture. Yes, it's beautiful and also very encouraging to me. Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode.

I've enjoyed it. It's been encouraging. So thank you. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We invite you to join our monthly partner program. Monthly partners are key to the financial sustainability of Anabaptist Perspectives. Partners also gain access to bonus content, including our exclusive podcast where we respond to audience questions and comments. Sign up at anabaptistperspectives.org.