Thank God For Failure

Before I was a stay at home mom of 4 yard apes, I was an EMT. Many things are important when you work in Emergency Medical Services, and one of those things is punctuality.

My husband is fantastically punctual. He was raised in a family that if you didn’t show up twenty minutes early for something, you were already late. Our early years of marriage I’m sure were full of stress for him because I am not a punctual person. I like to think I’ve gotten better, which is ironic because I now have 4 little people to get out the door at the same time as myself, but I still struggle to be on time.

I was terrible at being on time for my shifts as an EMT. One reason I was often late was poor planning. I would put things off that I should have been doing right away, like packing up my lunch, or getting into my uniform, or starting the car. Another was misjudging the amount of time it would take me to drive across the city to my starting station. I would end up sweating at every red light and construction sign as the clock slowly ticked down.

And the third reason I was chronically late was sleeping in. I am not a morning person. I have never been a morning person. And having to get up at 4am to go to work is early even by most morning people standards! I also developed the amazing ability of turning off my alarm clock while still sleeping. That’s very hard to explain to your boss without sounding like an idiot.

Honestly, I set an alarm. It just… turned off… somehow.

If you did something wrong at my job, like you crashed the ambulance, or drove to the wrong house, or yes, forgot your shift and showed up late, you received what was called a Memo Of Concern. We called them MOC’s for short.

If you received too many MOC’s then you were given a warning. If you received more you were put on a kind of watch list where dispatch would have to call you half an hour before each of your shifts to make sure you knew you were working and were going to show up. If you got another MOC after that you would be suspended.

Well, I can’t remember the final number of MOC’s that I received (I think it was 5 or 6) but whatever the number it was enough that I was put on the “not so great employee” list and some poor woman in dispatch would call me up before every shift and make sure I was coming to work. If I got one more MOC I would be suspended.

It took 6 months for each MOC to disappear from your employee file. In other words, I had to behave myself, and not step one toe out of line, or be one minute late, for roughly two and a half years to be MOC free.

I did everything I could to shape up. I printed off my schedule and put it where I could see it and highlighted all my shifts. I set multiple alarms around my room so I could no longer turn it off while sleeping.

Days turned into weeks, which turned into months. Things were going well. I had been good long enough I could almost have that last MOC erased.

Until that one day, with that one call, and that one slippery brake pedal.

My coworker and I were called to an echo. That means you have to get to the address as fast as possible because your patient has gone into cardiac arrest.

It was a typical busy day for EMS calls, and we were a long way across town from the call and I was driving. I whipped along the freeway as fast as I could but we still seemed to be taking forever to get there. Fire fighters arrived on scene before us and kept calling over the radio wondering what was taking us so long.

Finally we pull up nose to nose with the fire truck. I’m all flustered and nervous, my heart’s pounding. I’m trying to remember the basics of my training so I don’t screw this all up.

I reach down to grab some gloves.

I hear someone shouting “WHOA! WHOA!”

I look up just in time to see our ambulance roll forward and smash into the front of the fire truck.

I had forgotten to put the vehicle in park.

For a brief moment I debated hiding what I had done. Maybe I could get away with not confessing to my boss? Unfortunately when I rolled the ambulance into the front bumper of that fire truck it made a bang like a gun going off. The whole neighborhood heard it, and I had an entire crew of fire fighters as witnesses. Nope, the best course of action was to come clean. So I did.

A couple days later my supervisor pulled me into his office.

I remember I was so embarrassed I couldn’t even look at him. At one point he actually said to me: “Heather, look at me.” So I did. He wasn’t angry, in fact he was kind of amused. He proceeded to tell me other stories of seasoned paramedics who were legendary in their skill and life saving knowledge, forgetting to put ambulances in park and having them roll away on scene. That made me feel a little better.

Then he told me he wasn’t going to give me another MOC. He was just going to erase my crashing into a firetruck bumper, like it never even happened.

Boy can I tell you, that I felt like I had been give a second chance at life after that meeting. I practically skipped out of that office singing zippa dee doo da.

I do not like to tell people this story. I don’t like to tell any story where I have failed or done something stupid (believe me, there are MANY!) but this time in my life, when I was such an epic failure at something that should have been easy (putting a vehicle into park, and showing up to work on time), I learned the hard way that I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was.

Whenever I hear sermons on grace and forgiveness, I think of sitting in my supervisors office, so ashamed I couldn’t even look him in the eye.

“But he said to me, ‘my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” 2 Corinthians 12: 9-10

None of us want to be failures. We want to be great! We want our best lives now, we want to have it all together. We want to succeed. It makes us feel good. Failure does not feel good. It feels terrible and humbles you in crushing ways. Unfortunately its the crappy times in life that are the most rich when Christ is involved. It would be nice if I could be great and awesome and have my life together, but then I wouldn’t need saving.

So I am thanking God for failure. For my failures, because they make his grace and love that much sweeter. After all, Christ did not come for the healthy, but for the sick.

So go in God’s grace my friends, and know that even though you are a weak failure, he is strong.