By Mary Morrell
Failure is another stepping stone to wisdom
“Get wisdom, get understanding! Do not forget or turn aside from the words I utter. Forsake her not, and she will preserve you; love her, and she will safeguard you; The beginning of wisdom is: get wisdom; at the cost of all you have, get understanding.” — Proverbs 4:5-7
One day, when I was a sophomore in high school, my guidance counselor showed up at the door of my science class with a pained expression on her face. After whispering a few words to my teacher, I was ushered out into the hallway for something I sensed to be very dire.
“Mary,” she said tensely, “there has been an accident at your father’s workplace. Someone has been killed, crushed by an elevator.”
In those few seconds my heart stopped beating and I had no sense of being grounded to the floor or even being in school. It’s amazing how many thoughts can swirl through your head in just a few seconds, even as you feel your breath slipping away.
As she clutched my wilting body, I heard her say, “But your dad is OK. He just didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, or on the news, and worry.”
As I felt the blood rushing back to my head I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hug her or hurt her. What was she thinking? Where was her judgment? Certainly, she could have spared me my 10 seconds of terror simply by rephrasing her words: “Mary, your dad just called. He’s OK but he wants you to know there’s been an accident at his workplace.”
Well, since then I’ve learned that good judgment often fails us when we need it the most. None of us, despite our age, title, vocation or career, are immune to these failings.
As a young person, decisions made with poor judgment have ranged from something as ordinary as getting sent to the principal’s office or as serious as getting into a car with a stranger and almost becoming a case number.
During my adult years, moments of poor judgment included things like throwing a pot of spaghetti at my husband, buying things we didn’t need, or more seriously, failing to communicate with family members even when it was difficult.
My children’s poor judgment, which they admit now as young adults, have filled drawers with traffic violations, brought about close encounters with officers of the law, lost hours of time sitting in court, and lost opportunities for academic or professional advancement.
Sometimes we are the ones who suffer from our poor judgment; sometimes our behavior or our decisions hurt others, and often, that is the hardest thing to face.
But such pain brings with it a choice — to learn from the experience or, for any multitude of reasons, refuse to change.
There is an oft-quoted adage that states, “Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.” Just about any grandmother, wise old uncle or community elder will share the fact that their wisdom came about by living life and making mistakes along the way. My father used to warn me, “Life will teach you what school doesn’t.”
More often than not, as a parent, it is difficult to journey with children during the experiences that, we hope, will ultimately make them wise. We often times take their failures to be our own, or deny them the opportunity to learn because we can’t bear to see them hurt.
I suppose we are fortunate that our God is more confident in the role of parent than we are!
God generously gifted us with free will to enter into the life-long process of learning wisdom and gaining good judgment, knowing that our failures would be many, but trusting that our growth would someday lead to the healing of the world and the building of God’s kingdom.
That’s a lot of trust.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law