3. On Failure and Finishing: Devotional Response

Today, I had the pleasure of listening to Cassy Budd as she addressed the Byu students and staff. Her speech "On Failure and Finishing" recounted past failures as well as validated the reality that all humankind is prone to failure. She talked extensively on her trials of the past. One of my favorite stories she recounted was that when she'd been given piano lessons, her teacher used to wrap her on the knuckles to signal that she'd made a mistake. The wraps were less painful when she'd quickly remove her hands from the piano. This behavior was slowly conditioned in her so that whenever she would make a mistake, she would abruptly remove her fingers making the piano stop and making it harder to pick up right where she left off. Years down the road, Budd was called to be a piano player in church, but because this behavior of stopping whenever she made a mistake was so ingrained in her, she could hardly make it through one song without stopping. Once, she made a mistake, stopped, and then couldn't find her place and so the chorus sang all four verses of a hymn without musical accompaniment. She said this is the exact opposite of what one wants to do in life. A person, upon failing at something, should not simply give up or remove their fingers from the piano. We should continually strive for perfection, but when we inevitably fail, we should press forward by repenting and then learning from those mistakes.

To demonstrate how failing at certain things is beneficial to us, Budd compared us making mistakes to the Japanese pottery style of kintsugi. This is the technique of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusting or mixed with powdered gold, silver. platinum. The resulting piece looks absolutely stunning, better than the unbroken pottery in most cases. This example helped summarize her argument: After failing and being resilient, we are often better off and more perfected through the atoning power of Jesus Christ. Failure is often seen through a pessimistic lense, but we learn more from our failures and the correct solution is often more ingrained in our minds if there were many failures before we reached the correct solution (Budd). As Mrs. Budd said "Living perfectly is not the plan, repentance is the plan. Jesus Christ is the plan." It is okay to fail continually if we are frequently learning from these mistakes and utilize the atoning power willingly granted to us through Jesus Christ.

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(Cassy Budd pictures above)