Your teacher stoically hands back your test face down on your desk to hide your grade, because he knows that nobody would want to be seen with a score that awful. Even upside down, you can easily see the red ink that has bled all over your pages of hard work. You turn the paper over to see it, and your heart immediately sinks while you hold your breath. You can feel the blood rush to your face as your heart seems to beat louder than a bass drum. You still aren’t breathing; you don’t want to breathe because you’d probably fail at that too, you think to yourself. Despite these initial feelings, you eventually learn from these mistakes and come back even stronger.
Failures like those were the subject of the prayer service on Friday, February 26th.
There are many quotes about failure that were said last Friday, but one that resonated with many students was from this iconic Michael Jordan commercial.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan
Former three-sport athlete and ex-basketball-star Bobby Turner particularly loves this quote because “It shows that even the greatest players at the highest level fail and fall short of expectations. It shows the humanity that exists in every last one of us. It really makes me feel better in my own failures.”
One more quote that explains the necessity of failure comes from the first installment of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Batman Begins, when Alfred Pennyworth asks an adolescent Bruce Wayne, “Why do we fall, sir?” This leads to Pennyworths wise response, “So that we can learn to pick ourselves back up.” In every failure, there’s a lesson to be learned and this quote perfectly displays the necessity of picking ourselves back up and learning from our mistakes. Junior Evan Bausbacher applies this to his school work at Jesuit, saying, “Every time that I miss a problem, whether it’s from a test or from a simple completion grade, it hurts. I remember it for the next time and I try to never make that same mistake ever again.” Bausbacher perfectly shows how, through failure, we can succeed.
Stay tuned to The Roundup for more coverage of Jesuit’s Friday prayer services!
