A Wanted Man Page 6

Or your ways to that which destroys kings.

  PROVERBS 31:3

  We all the know that the reality of life outside the wire is that casualties will happen. So when the time and season enters your life, what do you do next?

  6 : SOMETHING UNEXPECTED

  As I put pen to paper for this book, I began to realize that a chapter about navigating failure would be beyond question the most needed chapter of all—and for blatantly obvious reasons: every man fails.

  Darren Tyler, a close friend of mine who is a recording artist manager turned preacher, often says it this way: “Friends, none of us are getting out of this thing unscathed.”

  It is a painful, sober reality of which Darren speaks.

  No man will leave this earth and exchange this world for the next without scars, bruises, and his own fair share of deep wounds from sins committed and sins received, along with a fair mixture of wounds that life gives to our friends and family. And some of those scars will remain fresh until the day we meet Jesus.

  Every man fails.

  Right now, in preparation for scholastic-level football, my sons are playing flag football for the YMCA. I’m the coach. It’s absolutely the coolest thing ever, because I have an opportunity to inject so many formative life lessons into their young souls. It’s equally sobering for the same reason. I know I’ll be accountable for these kids someday; therefore I do not take my responsibility lightly.

  My older son, Cole, is more risk averse than my younger son, Tucker. Cole is a planner. He’s like his mama. He is what she and I often refer to as a “sizer-upper.” He doesn’t just jump into the pool because all the other kids are swimming. No, he’s going to take a few minutes, look at the water, evaluate the risk level, and then make a decision.

  Tucker is a different story altogether. He’s liable to jump in the water without taking the time to put on his swim trunks. With Tucker, there are no questions and no measurements—just possibilities. Endless possibilities and adventures to be had.

  Though he’s young now, Cole is a super-skilled quarterback. Who knows if he’ll carry that through to junior high or high school, but for now he’s really excelling at that position.

  I felt weird putting him at QB in the early years (we started playing when he was six years old). You know, because I’m the coach and my kid is playing QB…all that jazz. The problem, however, was simple: when you have a bunch of knot-headed six-year-olds, somebody has to know what’s going on at the line of scrimmage.

  I asked an older coach who had coached his sons until they moved up to a junior high team, “What were your biggest challenges when they were age six?”

  Without hesitation he said, “You must, without question, get the snap off, which means that if you don’t have two kids—a quarterback and a center—who can make the exchange, know their roles, know the playbook well, and have good hand-eye coordination…” I can still hear him saying, “If you don’t get that part right, it’s all going to fall apart before the play even develops.”

  Cole, since he could barely walk, has had amazing hand-eye coordination. So, not knowing any of the other kids, I began to run him at center and also QB, because Cole is dependable. Crazy dependable. He’s coachable, and with that age group I needed “coachable” in a bad, bad way.

  Cole is not a racehorse. At least not yet. He’s a pack mule. Steady. Reliable. Strategic.

  However, Cole has a great arm to go along with his strategic self. He’s crazy accurate. So he’s coming along great as a quarterback.

  The problem is, like most people who are strategic planners, Cole tends to be risk averse. He is easily devastated by failures of the smallest kind. His greatest nightmare is that he has let you down.

  No, he doesn’t shed tears at a poorly thrown ball, nor does he freak out if he misses a shot at a gobbler on a turkey hunt; but you can bet the farm on the fact that his mistakes do not exit his mind easily. He’ll dwell on them if you let him. He’ll get down on himself if he’s not careful.

  This leads me to my point about every man, Cole included.

  I’ve told Cole time and time again, “Son, show me any champion in sports or in business, and I’ll show you a man whose past is riddled with failures. The difference between him and a guy you’ve never heard of is that a champion refused to be defined by his failures.”

  I tell Cole over and over again that the difference between champions and the rest of the world is that champions move past their failures and move on to possibilities that only exist—that only live—in the future.

  The more I’ve thought about living life outside the wire, the more Darren Tyler’s words haunt me.

  We are, in fact, not escaping this journey unscathed. We all are going to be wounded by our enemy.

  That is perhaps the most brutal fact of them all.

  Hollywood it may be, but Rocky Balboa said it well:

  Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!

  You are going to get hit. You live outside the wire. Daily.

  You are going to get hit, and when you do, you’re going to need some truths underneath you during that season of contingency-gone-into-action.

  You are going to get hit, and when you do, you’re going to need some truths underneath you during that season of contingency-gone-into-action.

  From here I’m going to share some insights with you that I’ve gained over the years. Some I’ve learned from navigating my own failures, and some I’ve learned by watching other men pull out of times and seasons when they were wounded by the thief.

  7 : BRUTAL FACT #6

  YOU MUST NAVIGATE FAILURE AND DO IT WITH BRUTAL HOPE

  Before you read any further, watch “Brutal Fact #6: Navigating Failure” at JasonCruise.com/WantedMan.

  You will fail.

  This fact is all too familiar because you’ve lived it.

  I’ve always been fascinated with business and the marketplace. God did not call me to further His kingdom through business, but I believe with all my heart that the marketplace is where God and His work in people’s lives are most overlooked.

  Think about it: Christians go to church once a week, but life happens at work. If you don’t believe that, then just start messing with someone’s career path and watch what happens next! Depression, panic, stress on the marriage, and other anxieties come from what happens to a person in the marketplace.

  Marketplace cultures are great educators of human nature, and one such prophet to that world, professor, consultant, and author Jim Collins, has provided vast wisdom as to how people move, breathe, and operate in successful companies.

  As I mentioned previously, Collins wrote one of the greatest business books of all time, Good to Great. It is an amazing book—not about how to run a business, but about how great leaders in business think. He also pioneered new ground with his work How the Mighty Fall. It’s a study on how great companies—ones with such legendary names as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Zenith, and so on—fell in epic proportions from being icons of business to utter failures or at least shadows of their former selves.

  In his research of failed business cultures, Collins made a simple, brutal observation about failure:

  Every institution is vulnerable, no matter how great. No matter how much you’ve achieved, no matter how far you’ve gone, no matter how much power you’ve garnered, you are vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fail and most eventually do.1

  Are Collins’s findings anything new when contrasted with scripture? No.

  Is not human failure at the center of the biblical stor
y? Of course it is.

  That’s what I love about the heart of God in terms of how He chose to tell His story—our story. God never covers over human failure; for in failure, we see the possibility of rising again—but only through divine intervention in one man: Christ alone.

  Over and over again we see failure in scripture. In fact, you could say scripture is one failure story after another, with short interludes in which somebody occasionally gets it right.

  The thing is, we are misled about Bible characters from the youngest age.

  Now before you go thinking I’m blaming your Sunday school teachers for being deceptive, I am not. No, what I am saying is that we often don’t know what to do with the very ugly side of humanity found in these Bible characters we idolize.

  Moses is often seen as a giant of a man with a deep voice who commanded Pharaoh to release God’s people. Did Moses do that? Yes, he certainly did. The deep voice? Maybe that’s just a Hollywood effect.

  Moses straight up killed a dude, too.

  With his bare hands, Moses beat a guy to death. Then he lived the life of a homeless vagabond. Not the sort of beacon of hope we want to show our kids when they are searching for a career path.

  Noah was a kingpin of reckless faith. He was a guy everybody thought to be the village idiot—right up until the day it started raining. Think about it: Noah had never seen rain before because God irrigated the earth from the ground up in those days. So did Noah have the kind of unquestioning faith that compelled him to build a boat for a catastrophic event for which he had no mental frame of reference? Yep, he sure did. That sort of faith was so abnormal we’d call it “faith of biblical proportions.”

  Not long after that event, this same Noah got so drunk that he took off all his clothes and passed out. As we’d say in the South, “He got nekid.”

  Noah lost his ever-loving mind for a moment and embarrassed his entire family.

  So, yeah, I could go on and on about how many people in scripture failed in epic proportions. Failed their families. Failed their colleagues. Failed the church. Failed God.

  Failure, or at least navigating it, is the story of our lives in many ways. However, we don’t talk about the seemingly negative aspects of biblical characters’ lives until students reach the high school youth group—if at all! So if there’s one brutal truth we must embrace, it’s that failure, in many ways, is inevitable in all of our lives.

  Jim Collins is right: “Anyone can fail and most eventually do.”

  You know what it means to lose money from poor decisions with credit cards. You know what it means to look into your wife’s eyes and try to explain why looking at porn has nothing to do with how you look at her. You know what it feels like to let people down, and you know what it feels like to be let down. Every man everywhere fails.

  The mountain to climb, then, becomes not one of how to avoid mistakes, but more so how to recover from mistakes made.

  God can take something ugly and mend it to a state where it can be used again.

  Victory is what brings beauty to the failure.

  Victory is what makes failure worth enduring.

  Victory is what makes hope something more than a fantasy. And that, too, my brother, is the story of scripture: that God can reconcile all of your failures in Christ. He can take something ugly and mend it to a state where it can be used again.

  OWN THE FAILURE

  I have been in full-time ministry since 1990. Yes, I started early. Way early. However, that gave me one distinct advantage: I’ve had a front-row seat to see how real people’s mistakes with money, marriage, relationships, and leadership have destroyed the heartbeat of life. I’ve seen far too many times how failure, once it has gone septic, wrecks the entire ecosystem of a man’s world.

  Perhaps the single most common trait I see in men when something gets broke is that most deflect responsibility. They admit a mistake but then transfer blame, or they might take 70 percent of the failure while the other 30 percent “is not my fault.”

  No, you chose to do it, so own it.

  No more lies.

  When you fail, you have to make a renegade commitment to stop all the lies. Lies and deception are what got you in a bad place.

  The enemy lies to us all. In fact, that’s where all sin begins. So you have to own it to get out of its path.

  I’m not into quoting long passages of scripture, but this time it’s different. You must read all fourteen verses of the passage that follows to see the context or it won’t necessarily make sense. After you have read the passage, we’ll break it down man to man.

  The enemy lies to us all. In fact, that’s where all sin begins. So you have to own it to get out of its path.

  We’ve already glanced at this sad soap opera earlier, but here’s the backstory: David, Israel’s king at the time, has an affair with a woman named Bathsheba, who was married to Uriah, one of David’s chief battle officers.

  David and Bathsheba do the deed, and she gets pregnant. Stress causes panic. Stress causes a man to take short-term gains for long-term losses, because stress clouds perspective.

  So in a season of stress and panic, David has an idea. Israel is in the middle of a war, so David sends Uriah straight to the front lines in hopes that he’ll get killed in battle, die a hero’s death, and no one will be any the wiser that this new baby who comes along is not Uriah’s.

  God does intervene, but not until after Uriah dies in battle.

  Nathan, a prophet, does something that most people overlook: he risks his life to tell the truth.

  Churchgoing people read this story as if Nathan just strolls into the king’s main office and calls out David on the spot for what he’s done. Listen, do you really think it was that easy? Nathan knew that all David had to do was motion to his guards and say, “Kill him, bury the body, and do it quietly.”

  This was not the Internet age when every human being walking the planet is only a smartphone video away from being a live-on-the-scene reporter.

  You could bury people much easier back then.

  Think about it: David had just had Uriah killed, so what’s two dead bodies? Don’t you think Nathan knew that?

  Nathan risked his life to tell David the truth on God’s behalf.

  This is how that conversation played out:

  Then the LORD sent Nathan to David. And he came to him and said, “There were two men in one city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a great many flocks and herds. But the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb which he bought and nourished; and it grew up together with him and his children. It would eat of his bread and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom, and was like a daughter to him. Now a traveler came to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take from his own flock or his own herd, to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him; rather he took the poor man’s ewe lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

  Then David’s anger burned greatly against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, surely the man who has done this deserves to die. He must make restitution for the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and had no compassion.”

  Nathan then said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘It is I who anointed you king over Israel and it is I who delivered you from the hand of Saul. I also gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your care, and I gave you the house of Israel and Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added to you many more things like these! Why have you despised the word of the LORD by doing evil in His sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the sons of Ammon. Now therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.’ Thus says the LORD, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will
lie with your wives in broad daylight. Indeed you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel, and under the sun.’ ”

  Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the LORD.” And Nathan said to David, “The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die. However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die.”

  2 SAMUEL 12:1–14

  The interesting aspect of this story to me is that David owned the sin. And because he owned the sin, the lies stopped. The self-deception stopped. The confusion stopped.

  What do you want to bet that, on that very day, David’s vision became clearer? I can almost guarantee you that he gained clarity right then and there.

  Did the pain vanish? No, not at all.

  Did the rumors stop dead in their tracks? No.

  Did David all of a sudden know exactly what to do next? Probably not.

  The consequences still felt staggering, but the lies did stop that day. When lies stop, healing is at least a possibility.

  Imagine how much worse this situation would have become, how many more people would have been hurt—or killed—had this king, who held absolute power and authority over his people, kept on inventing cover-ups for the other cover-ups.

  Think about it.

  Did it ever occur to you that sin, every single brand of sin in existence, has one common denominator? Each one starts with the sinner believing some form of lie.

  For David to sin against God, he had to accept some form of lie. Maybe the lie was “Who’s ever going to know about it?” or “You’re the king; do what you want.” And on and on it goes.

  Lies are the starting point for sin, and if you want to stop the lies, you have to own the failure first.

  There is no other first step back to righteousness. Owning the failure is the first and only way to freedom.