Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. – 1 John 4:7-10 (CEB)
We went to see an improv show last weekend. If you are not familiar with improv, it is short for “improvisation.” The show is unscripted, with the actors responding to one another and building on the ideas that one another produce on the spot. This particular show had the added randomness that whenever a character had to make an important decision, the outcome of that decision was determined by a card draw. The moderator would draw a card from a normal playing deck, and then the actor would pick whether they thought the next card would be higher or lower than that card.
For this particular showing that we attended, the actor picked incorrectly every time. That meant that every action he intended failed to work the way he wanted it to work. This made for great comedy as it turned into a running gag about his character’s ineptitude. It gave the whole show a bit of a Charlie Brown vibe. In the end he turned it into a statement on the importance of friendship – you don’t have to be good at things if you are surrounded by friends who can pick you up. More than that, it really did feel good to watch someone have to keep going when nothing was working out. Part of the enjoyment was that this was not planned. It was not a pre-meditated feel good story about a plucky dark horse holding on and finding a way. This was repeated unintended bad luck and failure.
Sometimes life can feel like a string of wrong guesses. The odds should eventually turn in our favor, but sometimes the run of things not working gets inordinately long. Yet we can remember that we are not alone, even in our failures. God meets us not in our greatest moments but in our lowest valleys. God comes down and enters into those moments. In fact, in those moments we are more likely to notice that God is with us because we can’t fool ourselves into thinking that we are the cause of our own success. It’s in the failures and cracks of life that we recognize what is always true, that God is with us and supporting us. You don’t need to succeed at everything when you are a surrounded by a God whose love overcomes all things.