I quit. (Actually, I never really started). There were two reasons. First, my dad forced me to do it. Bad start. Then I tried and was horrible. My body just didn’t turn the way it needed to. Grip, stance, head, swing, the right club, ball and bag, I just couldn’t get the basics down. I was a failure.
It occurred to me this weekend as I drove by the local country club that you never have any way of measuring good unless you start out bad. You need to be able to look back and see that both the good and the bad are needed—even required—in order to have the whole perspective. But we are such a competitive culture that we’ve set aside failure as a necessary part of the process.
And yet: failure is not a one time event. Failure is something that happens in all moments of time to all people. It is the way needed to measure progress and hope. My pastor turned me on to the English mystic, Julian of Norwich. Listen to these words: “First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.”
Without the fall (failure) we would experience no mercy, embrace no redemption, and rejoice in little. Getting the basics down and seeing progress dressed in mercy allows for a level of gratitude that we could not have without failure. The difference is that our Father will never make us do it. The metaphor of God as father could be written about forever. It will be sufficient for this perspective to simply understand that we will never be forced to acknowledge the fall or the recovery. It is a perspective that we must choose.
I still don’t think that I’ll take up golf. It takes too much time and I'll have to have a different way of thinking in order to succeed. But then as I write this, I realize that is a choice. A choice that may rob me of joy, community and satisfaction. I will fail before I even get the basics down, and that takes energy, commitment and an understanding that I have to embrace the bad in order to rejoice in the progress.
Well, maybe I can start at the driving range, it’s a beginning. Beginnings are important. Fore!