The Lesson of Mistakes

Sometimes, when you take on a responsibility or a project, a single problem can send everything spiraling downward.  Everyone’s had those days: the ones where nothing seems to go right, no matter how prepared you are.  When the pressure’s on, one mistake can turn into several, and each one makes you feel worse, and more likely to make another mistake because of the distraction. 

Something like this happened this morning, not to me, but to someone else, which is almost as bad.  Our minister is gone for a few weeks, and so we have a few substitutes to fill in on Sundays.  The woman who took on the job this morning is our newest fill-in minister, and she seemed to have a rough go of it.  There were a few things she added to the order of worship, which is a risky business with habit-bound Presbyterians.  I was prepared at the beginning for eye-rolls and stone glances, but there was more trouble to be had.  Several mistakes filled up the morning—our leader picked up the wrong prayer at the wrong time, and we had no children for children’s time (fortunately I and a few of the more precocious teenagers were willing to sit up front for a few minutes and pretend).  Then the organist (also a substitute) missed the cue to leave the organ and cross to the piano for the anthem.  That was one of the more awkward silences I’ve experienced—what could we do?  In my particular church, no one tells the organist what to do. 

As I watched the leader, I could just imagine the gut-twisting nervousness that she must have felt. When you’re in that situation, when you’re the one everyone looks at as things are falling apart, you might want to just leave the room, but you literally cannot.  Everyone expects you to be the one that fixes things, even if the fix consists of barreling on to get it all over with.  I wondered if she was upset about how things went.  Now, you would think a church congregation is one of the more forgiving audiences to experience this kind of thing, and mine is one of those more likely to meet mistakes like this with laughter, or with understanding smiles.  But people always have certain expectations from their leaders, and a leader with pride in herself would find this kind of morning very frustrating.

I choose to think of this, however, in a positive light.  Things happen, and these mistakes, while mortifying, can teach us something.  If we let our minds linger on what we’ve done wrong in the past, we tend to mess up more as we continue on.  In the end, our mistakes only matter in that they teach us what to do or what not to do next time--we can’t let them keep us from moving onward.  I admire the strength of a woman who can not only take on a position that isn’t hers, but also introduce changes and keep it all together when things don’t go quite as planned.  That is a form of courage, and we all have it to some degree.  All we need is to be more aware of it.