In his book Navigating Life With More Than Enough, Todd DeKruyter talks about how parents need to let their children experience failure and avoid constantly rescuing them from life’s dilemmas and difficulties.

Most of us aren’t professional athletes, but career disappointments and personal failures in family relationships and whatever we do are just some of the many ways we become disillusioned. Listen to quarterback Nick Foles talk about how past failures have shaped him as a person.

I’m sharing a guest blog today that is, to me, breathtaking and somewhat stunning. It won’t strike everyone as encouraging, perhaps, because it comes out of pain. However, I think it’s a bold and valuable perspective, one that we need to hear.

My friend Todd Dubord passed on these insights from the book Celebrating Failure by Ralph Heath. I look back at the past year and see several things I would do differently, in relationship to my church, and other challenging things I faced.  

It is often difficult to confirm the accuracy of a story, including this one printed in the Christian Digest and cited in a collection of stories assembled by Paul Tan. It wouldn’t surprise me to find it is accurate, but in any case the point of the story is a valid one, and I have seen it illustrated in less dramatic ways in my own life and in the speaking ministries of others.