I tend to be afraid of everything. Not like spiders and snakes and the dark and storms like most people, but more intangible things like failure and ridicule. I grew up feeling that nothing I did was good enough and and any love I might receive was hinged on being good enough.
My perfectionism is built on trying to make everything just right in order to be worthy, but the easiest way to not mess up is to not try. I tended to work really hard on day to day things but then not try things that scared me, that I thought I might fail at.
Most successful people will tell you that failure is the best thing you can do for yourself if someday you want to succeed. You learn more from failures than successes. I do know that if I got every answer right on a test except for one, going back and finding out the correct answer to that one missed question meant I would never forget that one answer ever again!!
Today I heard our minister say that important things are usually hard and I thought back to how much I have grown over the last few years. How even though I am still scared to fail, to screw up, to do the wrong thing, I at least try the hard things more often than I used to.
Long ago I realized that even stronger than my fear of failure is my desire to live up to my promises. If I tell you I am going to do something, I will do everything possible to make sure it is done! If I tell you I will show up, I will show up. If I agree to get a job done, then it will be done.
For example, during the pandemic and now our remodel, I have ended up cleaning out almost every nook and cranny in our house. In a drawer in the credenza in my office, I found an envelope with dozens of one inch by 5 inch slips of orange and green paper. I hand cut these slips of paper almost 20 years ago. The only reason I still have the slips of paper (and I did not throw them away this time when I found them either!) was to remind myself of the situation that caused me to have those strips to begin with.
The women’s organization at our church was going to have a conference with speakers and presenters all weekend. I was part of the group that was organizing the event, so I was given several tasks to fulfill. I chose simple, uncomplicated tasks so as not to screw anything important up! One of my assignments was to cut strips of paper for the attendees to put their names and phone numbers on for a drawing near the end of the conference.
Being me, I immediately came home and began to cut the strips of paper over the next week and had them in a basket, ready to go early. About a week before the event, I brought the basket to a meeting to hand off to the person who would need them at the registration desk. It was then that I was told that the slips were no longer needed, a perforated slip at the bottom of the registration form would fill that need, and I was shown the new form with the detachable entry.
Of course, it was a much better use of paper and time and made perfectly good sense so all I could do was share in the enthusiasm for this new, improved design and put my carefully cut, yet sad little slips of paper behind my chair for the duration of the meeting. Not wanting to waste all of the paper I had cut and wanting to remember the experience, I used many of the 200 or so slips for notes at my desk at home for awhile before putting the rest in an envelope in the credenza.
If you ask me to do something, I am going to do it- quickly and to the best of my ability. If you don’t really want me to do it, or you come up with another plan, you better say something and FAST! Don’t ask me to do something and then do it yourself, or give it to someone else to do!
In trying to get past my fear of failure which caused me to shy away from anything I felt inadequate to do perfectly, (which is most everything!) I decided to enlist my other annoying trait of quickly doing anything I promised to do in order to counteract my fears.
And with that was born my “Saying YES” plan. If I am ever on the fence about my ability to do something new, I say yes quickly. Then I am stuck. I have agreed, so I have to figure out how to fulfill my promise. If I really want to do something, but fear is what is stopping me, I say yes and then I have to overcome the fear in order to make good on my promise.
I have been president of the same organization at church that left me holding 200 little slips of blank paper, because I just said yes and figured out how I could survive such a thing as I went along.
When asked to direct my first “grown up” play (I had directed high school plays, fellow students in college classes and kids’ workshop productions, but never a play with adult actors) I quickly said “NO!”, just as quickly changed it to a YES and worried about how badly I was going to fail later. (I did not fail, by the way!)
Making myself say yes to things that are difficult for me has been life changing. Very rarely has my yes turned into a problem- usually it opens up a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities. It usually leads me to the very thing I should be doing, want to be doing, but would have been to scared to do.
Turning 64 today makes the rest of the sermon hard to hear and equally hard to share with those of you who are younger and look to us old folks for advice and words of encouragement. (Although some of my friends think my gift is encouragement, this will not be one of those moments!)
At the ripe old age of 64, I have no idea what my purpose is. I have no idea what I was created for and what I am supposed to be doing. I don’t know if I missed my purpose while I was scared, if I have done what I was meant to do since I have started saying yes, or if what I was born for is still ahead of me.
If you are looking to me for advice and encouragement on finding your purpose in life, forget it! I have absolutely no clue! Age has not brought me any wisdom on this subject. None at all!! I often question if I even have a purpose, even though including today, I have been assured roughly 23,360 times that I do.
What I do know is, I have wasted a bunch of time feeling like I need to figure it out and name that purpose. I was made to feel less than because I could not put my finger on what I was put on this earth to accomplish. So many people know their calling and I have never heard that small voice tell me anything about what I am “supposed” to do!
And then it dawned on me.
If God has a purpose for me, He is probably going to make sure it happens not because of me, but in spite of me. He will make sure that whatever it is, big or small, it will happen through my fear, through my cowardice, through the “no’s” I used to say and the “yes’s” I try to say now.
He will not let His plan go down the toilet because I am too dense to figure out what is going on. I need to relax about the whole “purpose” issue, do my thing the best I can on any given day and know that somehow, someway, He will get it handled.
I don’t have to name my purpose, I don’t have to tell all of my friends that I know why I am here and what day I fulfilled that purpose. In reality, if I knew exactly what my purpose was and when I fulfilled it, I would then be rendered useless from that moment on!! Better I should NOT know what, when and if I have done what I was put here to do, so I keep trying to do something, ANYTHING I can to be useful in this world, my purpose or not!
I guess I hope that just like today as I turn 64, at age 74 and 84 and eventually 94 I have no idea why I am here and what in the world my purpose is supposed to be. That I am still saying yes to things that scare me and then figuring out how to honor those promises. I hope that I am still pushing myself towards perfection, all the while knowing I will never get there. I hope that I can just keep saying YES when asked, yes to things that are difficult, yes to things that are scary, yes to something weird that unbeknownst to me might be my purpose after all!
