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The FFF (Formula for Failure)

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.

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Remember This Day

Every year, on February 4, our family celebrates the day that Hugh was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. It’s a little strange, I’m sure, to you non-diabetic families, to celebrate a day that brought us such an awful diagnosis. But I guess I should say that every year we celebrate the day that Hugh overcame his diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes.

February 4 – on that day I thought our normal life was over. At least the only life I had ever known with two small children would be over. No more spontaneous trips out of town. No more carefree meals with friends. No more going anywhere without supplies and food. I thought Diabetes was bondage – a slavery made out of blood sugar numbers and insulin shots.

And it was bondage, for a long time. The days were an endless nightmare of holding my son down to give him another shot and him telling me he hated me every time I did it. There were so many tears, so many nights where I didn’t sleep at all, so many angry remarks to God about the pain and the unfairness of it all. 

I wish I could tell you that one day it instantly all changed and I realized how fortunate we really were. But it didn’t happen in just one day. Little victories weaved together over the years to create this new normal for us. One night I went to a party and didn’t talk about diabetes at all. One day Hugh checked his own blood sugar without my help. We went out to eat at a restaurant and I didn’t panic when it was time to order Hugh’s meal. We took a vacation. We sent him to school. We laughed again.

And now the impossible has happened – 5 years have passed and we are doing ok. No, we are doing more than ok. We are happy. We are surrounded by the best friends and family, Hugh loves school, his sister takes care of him with the fiercest kind of loyalty, we take those trips and have those dinner parties and love the life we have been given.

So on February 4, we celebrate. We celebrate with a meal. Not anything special, but we always eat together. I usually buy cupcakes or a favorite cake and get Hugh and Amelia a little gift. I tell Hugh how proud we are of him and I tell Amelia what a great sister she is to Hugh. It’s fun to celebrate together and talk about the progress we have seen over the years.

And yet, and yet . . .

I remember the day.

I remember the panic and the fear. I remember the rush of throwing clothes in a suitcase to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. I remember not having the words to tell my son he was very sick. I remember hugging my baby girl good-bye and not knowing how many days I would be away from her. I remember not knowing what to feed my own child for fear of killing him.

I remember the bondage.

I cry the salty tears.

I taste the bitter herbs and they burn as I swallow.

I eat with haste, with my travel clothes on and my staff in my hand.

That night, every February 4, is my Passover meal.

Why do I have to remember? Why do I re-live the pain of that day?

Why can’t God allow us to forget the pain and the hard days, and just live in the present? Why does he require a Passover meal?

Well, I’m obviously not God, but if I had to guess, I think it would be because of this – First, God wants us to remember the bondage so we can remember who rescued us from it. He wants us to remember that He is loving and caring and there is nothing more that he wants to do than to save us, to bring us out of that place and into the land of milk and honey. He is there and He is waiting with His hand outstretched, ready to grab hold of us and never let us go.

But second, and possibly even more importantly, I think he wants us to remember the bondage because he wants us to see it in others.

Maybe if we forget our slavery, we will not have the eyes to see it in this world. Maybe if we don’t think about the most difficult days, we don’t remember how hard it is for some people in this very moment. Maybe if we dismiss our pain, we will never have the compassion to reach out a hand to the suffering, the hopeless, the dis-heartened, the least among us.

Maybe if we don’t celebrate Passover, we don’t invite others to the Feast.

For we all have been in bondage. We all have been broken.

I’m not sure what your Passover meal looks like, but I bet you have one too. I bet there are times when you remember the pain, the sadness, the grief. But I hope you realize, as I have, that there is a beauty in our Passover meals that we would never have without the bitterness of our tears. I hope you remember who brought you out of the house of bondage. And I hope you remember to invite others to the Feast.

“And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the LORD brought you out from this place: there shall no leavened bread be eaten.” Exodus 13:3

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Go Where There Is Good

Dear Friends,

I know.

I know how hard it is to hear of another tragic event happening in our world. I know what it’s like to be struggling with why right now. I know what it’s like to be hurting. I know what it’s like to question your Faith and your God and to wonder if there is anything kind left on this planet we call home.

I know.

There are days where it all falls on top of you and you have to be the bad guy at work or at home or with your spouse. There are days when you turn on the TV and turn it right back off again because you just can’t take the media bickering and the catastrophe of bad news.

I know.

I know that there are social media bombardments for you to pick a side, to take up arms and fight, to shout out your opinion as loud as possible so everyone can hear your outrage.

I know.

Not too long ago I struggled with these things too. I felt like I was drowning in the sea of negativity that is constantly swirling in our world. There were difficult times before Hugh’s diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes, of course, but his diagnosis was almost more than I could bear. The fact that my young son was diagnosed with such a cruel and un-forgiving disease was confirmation for me that the world was bad, and more specifically, out to get me.

I was angry. And everywhere I looked, for those first few months, I saw bad and evil and wrongs. Through my eyes blurred with tears and through the fears in my heart, I only saw the worst.

But I just couldn’t stay there. Maybe it’s the way I’m hard-wired. Maybe it’s the copious amounts of coffee I drink. Maybe I’m just goofy from lack of sleep.  Or maybe, just maybe, I had to go where there is good.

My grandparents own a farm in rural Mississippi and even though my grandfather has passed away, my grandmother still lives on the farm and we visit her often. Our Mississippi family has now spread out all over the country and spans the globe, but at any given moment, there is a house full of relatives and friends spending time on the farm. There are doctors and teachers, preachers and bankers, architects, engineers, nurses, therapists, students, and young children mingling around. There are people from different races, ethnicities, and countries, people who speak several languages, people who are Baptist and Methodist and Catholic. There are people who grew up in poverty, people who grew up in privilege, people who were educated in the best institutions in the country, and people who were educated in the rural schools of the South. When I wake up in the morning, there is usually already a group walking to the small pond, someone going fishing, a deep conversation happening on the porch, and there is always, always something wonderful cooking in the kitchen.

The sky is bigger there. The food tastes better. Colors are more vibrant and the stars are endless. The smells are a mixture of pine and grass and sweet potatoes roasting in the oven. And there, right there, in the middle of nowhere, there is good.

A few months after Hugh’s diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes, we took the kids to visit in Mississippi and for the first time, I felt like I could breathe. As I looked around the kitchen table at the odd assortment of people who call each other family, I remember thinking “This. Is. Good.”

And do you know what? It didn’t matter that Hugh had been diagnosed with Diabetes. As painful and difficult as that was, we were still there, eating biscuits sticky with syrup, reading the morning paper, laughing over a story together. The goodness was there and it always will be.

For decades now, people have been loved and nourished around that kitchen table. It didn’t matter what language they spoke, what their background was, who they voted for or what country they voted in – they were all welcomed and accepted. When I think of God’s love in human form, I often think of that table with my grandmother serving food and loving generation after generation, NO MATTER WHAT.

Dear friends, listen to me closely. There is so much good in the world. Sometimes I get weepy just thinking about it. There are people sacrificing for each other. There are families saying I will love you despite our difficulties and fears. There are thousands of volunteers every day feeding the hungry or advocating for children or giving their time and money for no other reason than it is the right thing to do.

So what do you do when the negativity seems to overwhelm you? When all you see is anger and fighting? I think the answer is very simple.

Go where there is good.

A rural farmhouse in Mississippi is not the only place where there is good. Step out of your box. Go serve a meal to the homeless. Sit on the back pew of a church somewhere and listen to the words of an old hymn. Volunteer to help children with special needs. Park yourself on a back porch with friends and laugh until the sun goes down.

Go where there is good.

Visit the sick in the hospital. Offer to sing at a nursing home. Invite all of your friends and your kids’ friends over for a night around a campfire. Share a meal with your family and for heaven’s sake, TURN OFF THE TV and PUT DOWN YOUR PHONES.

Go where there is good.

Remind yourself that there is still  good in the world and that it is all around.  But if you still can’t see it, come with me down a country road to a place where I know it exists. We will give you biscuits and a little bit of cornbread and black-eyed peas, and a whole lot of God’s love. And that might just help you open your eyes.

Love, Sally

P.S. Wallace Stegner writes in his book Crossing to Safety of a large family – “Happily, eagerly, they expanded their circle and let us in. Professors, diplomats, editors, bureaucrats, brokers, missionaries, biologists, students, they had been most places in the world and loved no other place as they loved Battell Pond. Their loyalties were neither national nor regional nor political nor religious, but tribal.”

The farm in Mississippi is my Battell Pond and the tribe is based solely on the fact that we know we are loved. I hope you have your own Battell Pond and that you feel God’s Beautiful Love when you are there. Find your place. Go there often – but don’t stay there. Go back out and share that goodness with others. The world is so desperate for it. 

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