Looking at Apparent Failures

Three Lessons from Dorothy Day

As I put the bow on another year of ministry (about 17 years in all), I’ve been considering all the apparent failures along the way. Programs launched that seemingly failed. People who flaked. Times I overpromised and underdelivered. Ideas that seemed sound before going sideways. Ministry is a divine venture, to be sure, but a human one also. It wears human depravity on its sleeve, because it rubs elbows with it.

As I’ve considered the ups-and-downs, I’ve been struck by three excerpts from Servant of God Dorothy Day. So here are three sayings for dealing with apparent failure:

“I feel that I have done nothing well. But I have done what I could.”

“What we do is very little, but it is like the little boy with a few loaves and fishes. Christ took that little and increased it. He will do the rest. What we do is so little we may seem to be constantly failing. But so did He fail. He met with apparent failure on the Cross. But unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest. And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.”

“I should know by this time that just because I feel that everything is useless and going to pieces and badly done and futile, it is not really that way at all. Everything is all right. It is in the hands of God. Let us abandon everything to Divine Providence.”

The first one touches on effort. Feelings of failure are one thing, especially for a melancholic. But effort is another. Sometimes the outcome isn’t there, even when the effort is. In those cases, the effort is what you can hang your hat on.

The second has to do, first, with littleness. When you think about what the little boy in the Gospel offered and what we have to offer, it’s a pittance. Fraught with sin and selfishness, even what little we offer, we often offer in a kind of guarded way — or with an eye to what we’re going to get in return. We offer so little and even that meager offering sometimes ends in failure, like the one who fed the 5,000 dying on the Cross. In the paradox of paradoxes, Christ’s apparent failure on the Cross was his triumphant victory over sin and death. With Jesus, things weren’t what they seemed, and perhaps our failures, united to his, aren’t what they seem either.

I think about this a lot. I used to criticize DREs and youth ministers who had teeny tiny programs and who might have had unattractive personalities. All questions about their giftedness for ministry aside, they tried and they had a genuine desire to help young people and young families. On paper, they failed completely. Yet, despite this, they were there for those people — praying for them and sacrificing for them. Lord knows what role these sacrifices and humiliations, endured on their behalf, will play in their salvation.

And this pushes into the third and final quote. All of ministry, like everything in life, is in God’s hands. Just because everything seems to be going to pot, it’s not. So long as we abandon ourselves and our efforts to Divine Providence, we can trust that he’s got it and he will bring it to completion in his time and in his way. (Both of which — his time and way — differ from how I’d handle things, but the good Lord hasn’t asked me for my opinion on that yet.)