When We (Inevitably) Botch It / Failure and a Life Worth Living

We all fail sometimes. We all need to deal with broken relationships, with wrongs we have suffered, and perhaps even more, with wrongs we have committed.

These wrongs all weigh on our souls and hinder us from moving forward.

So what do you do when you have botched a relationship?

Theologian and Life Worth Living co-founding professor, Miroslav Volf reflects on how to respond to failure in this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matthew Croasmun), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

Transcript

Ernest Hemingway began one of his memorable short stories, entitled “The Capital of the World,” with the following lines:

“Madrid is full of boys named Paco. which is diminutive of the name Francisco, there is a Madrid joke about the father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal, which said, Paco, meet me at the Hotel Montana noon Tuesday. All is forgiven—Papa. … and how a squadron of Guardia Civil 800 young men who answered the advertisement.”

The joke is about the ubiquity of the name Paco in Spain. But it works only because of the underlying longing of many to be forgiven, whether they are sons or daughters, mothers or fathers, friends or colleagues. You may not be into forgiveness. But we all need to deal with the broken relationships, with wrongs we have suffered, and perhaps even more, with wrongs we have committed.

They weigh on our souls and hinder us from moving forward. So what do you do when you have botched a relationship? You can just deny that you did anything wrong, suppress the memory of having done it, and proudly live in untruth.

Or you can just keep trying, learning from failures and moving forward and away from the person you have in fact wronged. the bridge to somebody You deeply love, or even somebody with whom your life closely intertwines. Might you not want to be forgiven?

Eight hundred Pacos who responded to that telegram wanted just that. But how does one repent well so as to receive forgiveness well? and is forgiveness enough to rebuild the bridge?

What else? What might you need to do?