Finding Fear:: Fear of Failure

Have you ever stumbled into something that you were good at?

When I was in high school we had a kind of trivia competition called The Knowledge Bowl and one of my teachers offered extra credit to those who competed. To be good at this competition you needed to have retained a bunch of seemingly meaningless information and you needed to be blindly confident enough to quickly buzz in your answers. 

Know a little about a lot of things and be arrogant enough to think you knew it all? That was teenaged Kurt's very lengthy and descriptive middle name. 

My team started off laying waste to the competition. With each bit of trivia that won my team another round of the event I became more and more engaged. I was teeming with confidence and I can vividly remember yelling, "I'm in your head, Doug!" after answering a question about the location of Custard's last stand to a member of the other team.  

My team ended up in the final round of The Knowledge Bowl against the smartest kids in the school. I was intoxicated with victory and felt invincible. I knew this last round was a mere formality to my coronation as the champion of all knowledge. 

It started off well and I kept pulling random bits of trivia from the nether regions of my brain. On a roll our team was asked, "How many teeth do adult human beings have in their mouth."

My buzzer was already lit and I instantaneously blurted out "55!"

Fifty-five. 

Teeth. 

In one person's mouth. 

There was a stunned silence in the room as everyone struggled to envision the size and density of a jaw that could support the weight of 55 teeth. I'm sure at least one person cocked their head like a confused dog at my decision to go with an odd number. 

The invincibility flooded out of me like a fully inflated balloon set loose in an empty gymnasium. I was suddenly very, very vincible. 

I failed. Impressively and very publicly I had failed. 

And even though that happened a long, long time ago there is still a part of me that feels like I'm standing in that room today. Completely embarrassed and exposed as a the fraud I felt I was. I had a good run and had fooled a lot of people, but now everyone knew the truth about me. 

Failures much larger and much smaller have kept people from trying any number of endeavors in the future. Some of us let the fear of failure keep us from stepping up or opening our mouths. 

I hope you'll listen in and discover the ways that God might be calling you to acknowledge the fear of failure and act anyway.