I was what some people would say, one of those lucky kids in school. I enjoyed reading and taking tests. I liked learning new things and tackling a problem. And I usually could figure out what needed to be done to get a good grade, do it, and then pass the test. School came fairly easy to me.

I liked getting good grades. I was proud of them. I wasn’t very good at sports and was fairly shy when I was younger, but I soon realized I could get attention and praise for my academic achievements. The teachers liked my grades, my parents liked my grades, I could get a shiny trophy at the end of the school year for my grades – it wasn’t long before I equated good grades with success. 

As I got older, I started to think of my classes as something similar to an algebraic equation. What formula did I need to use to get a good grade? It went something like this:

 X + Y = A+100 Success!!! 

How could I perform in this class? What teacher liked for me to ask a lot of questions? What teacher wanted a quiet student who never bothered him? Who wanted me to write long, detailed essays to get an A and who preferred brief, precise essays? I could always figure it out. 

College became even more of a challenge to prove my success. But I loved it. I loved the fact that I had the secret formula to winning . X + Y= A+ 100 Success!!! Every. Single. Time. (Hi Enneagram 3s – Yes, I’m one of you.)

When I graduated from college and started my teaching career, I was still working that formula. In my mind, my principal and supervisors took on the role of my teachers. What did I need to do to get a good grade from them? Simple – pass my observations with flying colors. Show growth in my students. Figure out what equaled an A+ 100 Success!!! and get to work to achieve it. Wow, I was good at this. 

Then I had a son. A beautiful, perfect baby that I adored more than anything else in the world. He was a gift from the day he was born. 

So, of course, I put my formula to work on him:

X + Y = happy, healthy baby (Which still equated to an A+ 100 Success!!! in my mind). 

This is a little embarrassing for me to admit, but I would take the baby book What To Expect The First Year and cheerfully check off my son’s accomplishments each month. I’m not talking about just reading the list and mentally checking things off – I’m talking about taking a pencil to the developmental lists in the book and literally marking each developmental stage off the list. Crawling by 9 months? Check. Saying at least 5 words by 12 months? Check. Eating a variety of foods by 15 months? Check. 

Good Mom + Total Devotion + Sacrifice + Doing Everything Right = Happy, Healthy Baby/A+ 100 Success!!!!

And don’t even get me started about our well check-up visits to the pediatrician. That was my report card. The pediatrician was my teacher and he was giving me the good grades. “He looks great” or “He’s very healthy”, or for bonus points – “He’s thriving” made me feel like I had the formula figured out again. I was getting an A+ 100 Success!!! in motherhood. 

Until one day . . . that awful day when our pediatrician told me our son had Type 1 Diabetes and he was very sick. 

That day a big, red F was scrawled across my life. 

For the first time, I had failed to get the good grade. And what was even worse was that because of my failure, my bad grade, my son would be suffering. He would bear the burden of my F – for the rest of his life.  

My formula had not worked. I was a failure. And it took me a long, long time to recover from it. 

If you have never felt like a failure, if you have never had a red F marked on a page in your life, then bless your heart, you probably haven’t lived to see 40 yet. Failure in life will happen, but here’s what I learned through my first F: We ALL have had failures. Some may have stemmed from our own bad decisions, some may have come out of nowhere. Some may happen in school, in our marriages, in our careers, in our family. And it hurts. Especially when we have a formula that we thought would prevent or protect us from those failures. 

The beautiful part of my failure, though, was that over time I quit judging myself so harshly and criticized others even less. It’s hard to remark on someone else’s scarlet letter when you have one of your own pinned to your chest. 

So slowly, over lots of tears and pleas for help and the silent treatment I gave God, I began to understand that I had been using the wrong formula my whole life. There was no X + Y = A+ 100 Success!!! 

There was only one formula to use and Jesus had given it to us thousands of years ago:

Love God + Love Others = Love

It’s a backwards sort of equation that makes no sense at first. It shows us how to give and not get. It demands that we be last and not first. It stands us on our head sometimes, then pushes and pulls us, and leaves us with more questions than answers. And it’s the only formula that will ever lead us to true success, which really doesn’t look like success at all. It just looks like love. 

I should have followed it years ago . . . 

I wish I could tell you that I have learned my lesson and I don’t strive for those As in life anymore, but I still struggle with it. I fight the urge to compare, to judge others, to work my old formula to achieve success. But now I know that there is no pass and fail in life. There is only one formula, dear friends, and that is love.  

And we all can get an A in that.