What happens when you fail at something you want to succeed at? Delivering a public presentation, making a first impression, completing a project?

We all have walked away from something with the realization that it didn’t go as planned or envisioned. We know it. It wasn’t our best work. Was it even good work? 

We can and should always learn from our failures. Our greatest successes will come through understanding why, where, and how we failed. 

There is, though, a greater understanding to be sought. Above all it is in those circumstances involving a failure that impacts your whole life. It’s the sudden loss of a job or a spouse. It’s a lifelong sickness or injury. It’s the exposed lie you told or the betrayal of a friend.  

Once these events occur, we say, “It’s in the past”. But being in the past, do they have no present effect on us? Of course they do.

If I preach a great sermon, I will feel that it has had a great impact on people and will make a positive difference in their lives. If I preach poorly, I will feel that it has had little to no impact on people and will make no difference in their lives. I can “move on” from this by saying something like, “Well, it’s in the past.” I may mean by that that I should forget it, because there’s no good in dwelling on it. Or I may mean that it was a waste of time, so nothing good will likely come out of it. But can it mean that only the good sermons are useful in God’s hands?

What if God always took the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, sermons and used each for the good of His people? What if all the sermons I ever preach are a part of God’s “unbounded now”? 

What if all things good and bad and all moments ugly and beautiful in my life are eternally present to God, are part of His “unbounded now”? Then He can take and work all things together for my good. 

This can free me from discouragement and the false belief that only my best sermons or only my best moments are useful in God’s hands. God takes what is nothing, what is weak, what is foolish to make something good, something new, something beautiful. 

Nothing in your past—anything you’ve done or that has been done to you—is a waste in the hands of God. You are at all times present to him. 

He is the God of seeing. He is the one who purifies you, washing away your stains and healing your wounds. He is the God who takes all things broken and old and makes them whole and new. He is the God who is creating a new heaven and new earth in which pain and suffering and tears and sorrow will no longer abide. He is the God who is the Beginning and the End and who from beginning to end is finishing what He has begun in you.  

We can enter this eternal life of God by doing what Hagar did when her past seemed to close off her future: submit and trust in God who was, who is, and who is to come. “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.” (Genesis 16:13)