You cannot fail!

But you can mislabel your progress.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, got it right.

I like Mr. Edison. He’s got a valuable lesson to teach us. You see, I am a bit of a lighting geek. Maybe it’s because I used to enjoy playing around with the old-school theatre lighting in my school’s hall and performance spaces. Or maybe it’s because I’m a keen amateur photographer, and appreciate really nice light coming in through the camera lens.

Either way, I’m fussy about light, so please do humour me while I geek out for just one paragraph. I really like the old-school tungsten filament lamps that pull ten times the power than their LED equivalents. The quality of their light is so much nicer! I have a strong dislike of those energy-saving compact fluorescent lamps, because the quality of light output is terrible. It’s actually missing a whole bunch of wavelengths. They also flicker almost imperceptibly, which I’m told puts an extra stress on your brain. So in an attempt to find a balance between energy efficiency and quality lighting, I actively go hunting for high-quality LED products that do not have any flickering, and emit a broad range of wavelengths. If you’re interested, the metric I look out for is called CRI, or Colour Rendering Index. Lights with a higher CRI emit a wider range of wavelengths closer to what the sun emits. If the CRI is above 90, that’s pretty good.

(OK, enough geeking out now…)

None of these technologies would have happened if Edison’s thinking led him to believe he was a failure. Edison went through a mere 10,000 prototypes of lightbulb before finding something that worked. That’s 10,000 times his light bulb didn’t work the way he wanted it to. According to this article in Forbes, Edison once said:

“I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”

The devil is really keen to ensure Christians everywhere are too demoralised to do what God called them to do. This is partly why failure, perfectionism and anxiety are all too common. I am familiar with all of them. If you suffer from any of these, you are not alone, but you are not defined by any of these labels. You might feel them, but you are not defined them. I will not judge your character because of them, and neither will God. However I will offer a break from the thinking that can so often restrict you, in the hope you can be set free.

I believe God wants us to discover more about Him, and more about His creation. I rather suspect God is thrilled to watch His children delight in learning more about Him, rather like children excitedly exploring a new playground. But to learn about Him while living in a fallen world, we have to violently ignore that all-too-familiar voice of self-condemnation. (You could argue it is actually devil-condemnation). We need to allow ourselves the freedom to be curious without judgement, until we have found what God would like us to find. I guess it’s like a ginormous game of heavenly hide-and-seek.

With 10,000 prototypes, Edison explored (not failed) to the extreme. That’s 10,000 different products he created, only to find he hadn’t quite got it right. Here’s the major switch in thinking: Edison believed he had travelled through 10,000 opportunities to learn, to discover, to practice, to grow. In worship leader Matt Redman’s words, it would be 10,000 reasons to bless the Lord, oh my soul.

If we are truly living in darkness as the Bible suggests we are, every new discovery, every trial and error, every little exploration, is a new light that gets lit. It illuminates something you didn’t know before. It’s a success! Yet, the devil’s game is to demoralise you enough to turn the lights off, stop exploring, stop growing, and do what you’re told.

But as I said at the start, I am a bit of a lighting geek. I like strong, good quality light whose output is as close as possible to the sun that God created. I don’t like erratic and uncertain flickering, because it’s an unnecessary stress on my brain. So I’ve shoved off the fear, and keep looking for opportunities: opportunities to get out of darkness, to turn another light on, to learn about the creation God has placed me in, to learn about God’s character and who I am in Christ. The more, the merrier.

If you haven’t succeeded in finding what you are looking for, then it’s not a failure. It’s simply a “not yet” lightbulb you have lit, on a thrilling discovery journey, one small step at a time. God loves to join you on your discovery journey, too.

Keep on turning those lights on!