Failure is a word that strikes fear in the heart of everybody. Our society has become so success-oriented that we have very little tolerance for failure.  We glamorize Lebron Jameses of the world, and ridicule misfits and also-rans like you and me.

There was one of those reality television shows on with several young people placed in a house together for weeks. One of the girls made the candid remark, "I have never failed at anything I have ever tried to do."  It was one of those sentences that makes you stop while you are crossing the room and ask, "What did she say?" I think I will never forget her honest confidence as she said it. Maybe it caught my ear because of my own struggles with failure.  But I remember thinking, "Yeah, I was young once too."

If you live long and attempt much, you will run up against failure. People fail every day. They suffer from failed relationships, failed marriages, failure at work and failure in health.  Most of us can identify with failure, and we know from experience that failure is hard to cope with in a world like ours. When we fail at something, most of think of it as the ultimate and irreversible tragedy of all time.  We see it as the one aspect of life from which there is no reprieve and no reversal.