One of the girls made the candid remark, I have never failed at anything I have ever tried to do. 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. 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. I find it very interesting that in our passage for today Jesus both experienced failure himself and expected his disciples to fail.