We are our failures.

We are our failures.

We are our successes.

We are our mistakes.

We are our triumphs.

And we are so much more.

As much as I would like to forget my past or move beyond my regrets. These things have shaped me just as much as any personal accomplishment or milestone. The pain I experienced in the wake of the fall out from quitting my first job as a youth pastor to the ensuing 3 year tail spin changed me. I would not be who I am today, I would not look at the world the same way now if it weren't for the very things - if I'm honest - I wish I could have avoided.  Yet I'm grateful for where my journey has taken me.

This past Sunday, as I was heading home after work and stumbled onto this segment on the radio. It was an interview with Brene Brown, I highly recommend checking out the whole interview, but she was being asked about the research she has been doing for the last 12 years on shame and vulnerability. She stated:

I think we lose sight of the beauty, the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn't know I could get out from underneath. You know, the moments I look back in my life, and think, those were the moments that made me — were moments of struggle.

She continues later:

I can tell you as a researcher, 11,000 pieces of data, I cannot find a single example of courage, moral courage, spiritual courage, leadership courage, relational courage, I cannot find a single example of courage in my research that was not born completely of vulnerability. And so I think we buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it.

I understand our desire to move beyond our past, to heal from the hurt - to define it and not have it define you.  The reality is that these things scar and leave their imprint, ask anyone who has experienced a close relationship or marriage fail.  Often how we live now and how we engage another changes - we try to protect ourselves not to experience that hurt again.  This is not good nor bad but simply the reality of what has happened.

We must learn to be ok with this.

We must accept the fact that we are all a walking contradiction - we embody tension.

We are a mess. We are conflicted.

We are both good and bad, saint and sinner.

And maybe in the end, may we realize the depth that Leonard Cohen was tapping into when he sang:

Love is not a victory march

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah