Celebrate Your Failures...Celebrate Life!

We all go through what seem like ups and downs in life, it is so easy to celebrate our times of success and worry/complain about the season of the supposed failure. I think what we forget to realize is that our failures are what teach us and allow us to grow. There are people out there (like myself) who are driven by their emotions, good feelings make us believe that life is good and bad feelings make us believe that life is bad. I think the reason this occurs is because we have not mastered the skill of properly discerning the illusion of time. Yes, I called it "the illusion of time" because, does time really exist? Lately I have been fascinated by Einsteins theory of relativity, which the best way to explain it in laymen's terms is a quote from the man himself:

"If you sat on a hot stove for 5 minutes, it would seem like an hour. If you talked to a beautiful and charming woman for an hour it would seem like 5 minutes. Thats relativity" -Albert Einstein

Time is relative to the individual or group of connected individuals. It intrigues me the way my five year old son does not comprehend time the way I do. The only comprehension of time he has is by the small moments that occur in his life; Watching a movie, how long his sister is at school, his mother is at work, how long it takes to play a certain game, etc. He will ask me a question like how long till Rylee (his sister) gets home from school? I will respond, 2 hours and he will say yeah, but how long is that? In which I respond one movie, then he gets it. It is my experience that younger children have a very different experience with time than the rest of us. We know from science that as crazy as it sounds time travel is theoretically possible even though not currently practical. Which is even more of a reason why I believe that time does not really exist. It's only relative.

If you believe in God like I do then what is even more fascinating to me, is the theory that God does not see time like we do, (which for me brings a whole new meaning to "faith like a child") there are numerous accounts of God's time in biblical scripture 2 Peter 3:8 (With God, one day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day.) Isaiah 46:10 (I make known the end from the beginning) Revelation 1:8 (I am the alpha and the omega the A-Z, the beginning and the end)

In John 11 when Martha was upset about her brother Lazarus's death and Jesus said to her your brother will rise again, Martha said I know he will rise again in the resurrection in the last day. Jesus says something so profound we are still trying to unravel its mystery. Jesus said "I AM the resurrection and the life." With this short statement we see how Martha (which we can easily just replace her name with ours) put her understanding in chronological time (a start and a finish) while Christ's understanding of time was and is in the eternal, ever present NOW!

Definition from Wikipedia:

Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined period of time in which something special happens. What the special something is depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.

There is a scene in the Disney movie Meet the Robinson's where Franny says "I propose a toast to Lewis, and his brilliant failure." We all need people in our life who celebrate our failures just as much, or maybe even more than our successes, because most of the time it is our failures not our successes that teach us about the heart of life.

It is with this understanding that I am learning to live, even though there are ups and downs I believe that the sum total of all life is good. John Mayer in his song "the heart of life" says it so beautifully like this:

Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
Fear is a friend who's misunderstood
But I know the heart of life is good

James 1:2-4 (The Message)

Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.