I’m very into endurance athletics, as avid readers know.

There is this guy, Ross Edgley, ultra-long-distance swimmer. He’s a total science experiment. After a few attempts at the “world’s longest swim” didn’t go right, he had an interesting insight into the difference between failures and lessons… failures are missed learning opportunities. If you fail then learn the lesson and apply it to success, it’s better to think of it as a lesson than as a failure. If you overcome the next challenge because of what you learned by failing before, that failure is transformed – it goes from being a defeat to a kind of victory, in the macro.

Wednesday I end my time as a 33-year-old. This is “the age of perfection” – the age at which Our Lord redeemed us. While I did not suffer the way He did, this has been an absolutely brutal year. Defeat after defeat. Humiliation, stress, disappointment, anxiety, despair. Relationships threatened. Money issues. A lot of dark moments and loneliness. A lot of rage.

A lot of pain.

I would say that this has been the worst year of my life. But that’s short-sighted. In the micro, yes, it was terrible. I would never want to live it again.

But in the macro it might end up being the best year of my life. The question now is how to learn and apply the lessons which the failures contain.

My weird little athletics vlog, which I post sporadically, is called “Suffer, Die, Rise” – that’s it. That’s the pattern. The transformation that can occur after putting in the painful and unglamorous work and putting up with many failures to get the one big win that recasts everything in a new light… that’s the sweet stuff.

There are more analogies with endurance sports, but that’s the core – because that’s the core of living a life modeled after Christ.

I don’t know what you’re going through, dear reader, but hang in there. What seems terrible now may indeed be painful. But it may eventually be so useful as a lesson that it ends up being some of the best stuff that ever happens to you.

See you next week…