This week I am thankful for parents, churches and the wider community, as well as passionate and dedicated staff. At the 2024 celebration banquet, on a Saturday night, teachers supported the year 11 students and I want to share Mr Kershaw’s address to them…

Mr Kershaw's Farewell to Year 11: You are going to FAIL! 

 ... how will you handle that?

I am AWESOME! I am a success!

• I have succeeded at programming (which I really enjoy)
• I have succeeded at climbing (steady progress over time)
• I have succeeded at teaching (though I'm maybe not as innovative as when I was younger?)
• I have succeeded at being a husband (kind of, maybe? You'll have to ask Cath)
• I have succeeded at being a dad (this has definitely stretched and changed me the most)

Apart from programming, none of these were in my plan when I was 16.

I am also a failure 🙁

• I failed at Zumba dance (apparently I cannot orchestrate multiple limbs simultaneously)
• I failed at Spanish GCSE (got a G, can recognise written words but not speak it. At all)
• I often fail at basic arithmetic (as my maths students will attest)
• I failed at being a programmer for Dr Frost.

I didn't care about the others, but not getting accepted by Dr Frost hit me really hard.

I did a 1 month trial creating maths question generators for their website.

I REALLY enjoyed it. I spent most of the Easter holiday writing interesting code to solve intriguing problems. I built a sweet testing rig, much better than the tabbed web interface they were using, with an auto-refreshing local server for instant feedback and multiple options for generating specific question types, all packaged nicely so their devs could roll it out to the rest of the team.

But at the end of the month Dr Frost said my lack of a maths degree and zero experience teaching A level maths would limit my ability to contribute to the project. Limited funds, small team, yadda yadda yadda… I didn't hear any of that. I just heard "You're a failure."

In hindsight...

Today, with a few months' distance, I realise it was totally the right call.

It was supposed to be 5 hours a week, but I was putting in 8 or 9 hours A DAY!

Which was survivable during the holiday, but I don't have that kind of spare time available during term time. I already use up all my 'spare' time preparing and marking school stuff.

I am… a tad obsessive. I never do anything 'a bit', I always throw myself into projects 110%. I'm a candle-at-both-ends kinda guy.

Working for Dr Frost would've been a ton of fun… but it's not what God has put me here to do.

Look back at your painful situation after a few hours / days / weeks / months (after the raw pain has died down) and ask "Was this my plan, or God's plan?"

Tough times will come... but it's all in the plan

In Exodus 4 God appeared to Moses in a burning bush to tell him the next stage in The Plan for his life. He was a Hebrew who'd avoided crocodiles to be brought up in the royal household. He's been literally 'set aside' for great things. But he does a bad thing (murder!) and runs off to hide in the desert. For FORTY YEARS! Eventually God tracks him down (!) and sends him back to Egypt to rescue the rest of Israel from slavery under Pharoah. He's unwilling to go (despite being the only Hebrew with a working knowledge of the royal court) and grumbles against the plan so much that God consents to letting his brother Aaron along to do the talking. 

God's plans are often weird

Then there's a lot of arguing, terms and conditions, plagues, the Red Sea crossing and finally the people that just got rescued get to the Promised Land… and reject God's plan (flowing with milk and honey) so God waits for 40 years til all those who DIDN'T trust His plan have died in the desert.

God's plans are, very often, weird:

• Walk round the fortified city til it falls down
• Play music as you approach your enemies so they know where you are
• Send the majority of your troops home before the start of the battle
• Become a human, live sinlessly & die horribly, paying the price for eternal reconcilliation

God's ways are not ours.

The Plan

A few thousand years on from Moses, another baby is born, and another regional despot orders another mass infanticide trying to thwart God's plan.

Like Moses, Jesus spends his toddler years in Egypt, but his destiny is elsewhere - back in the Promised Land that Moses tried (ultimately successfully) to avoid.

Jesus knows The Plan. He was there when the Three of them came up with The Plan, presumably toasting marshmallows around a camp fire in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve got themselves booted out for having their OWN plan…

The only Plan that could rewind their disobedience. God takes our place.

Following the Plan

Thirty years later, Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So far The Plan has been going well:

• Collect a random bunch of normal-ish people
• Confound and disturb the religious types into asking whether they've got God all wrong
• Force everyone you meet to make a personal decision, one way or another, about whether they're going to follow God's Plan or continue their own way

Now it's showtime. Jesus knows the next 24 hours will bring beatings, torture, & death.

Worse still, taking on the world's sin will sever his connection with The Father.

But… this is The Plan. This was always The Plan.

Psalm 22:1-3

1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

    Why are you so far from saving me,

    so far from my cries of anguish?

2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

    by night, but I find no rest.

3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;

    you are the one Israel praises.

Heads you win, tails you... win?

Christians have an apparently fatalistic attitude to God's Plan.

"Whatever happens", they say, "that was God".

If I get the job, that's God. If I don't, that's God too.

Wait, what?

It seems a bit like Schrödinger's cat.

Maximising good?

But it's actually only weird because we are thinking from a human perspective.

God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and seeks only good for his creations.

But what does 'good' look like? That's the problem. 

We generally measure 'good' by the ratio of pleasure to pain, joy to trouble, peace to pressure, whatever. 

Humans are short-term maximisers. We're not much better than toddlers.

We accept small_bad now (homework, digging the garden, physiotherapy, visiting the in-laws) because we know it leads to big_good later. Sometimes much later, like putting aside pension contributions from your first pay packet…

God's focus is the eternal. Not tomorrow, next week or "When I'm 65". Eternity.

You are going to fail

Tough times will come. Sooner than you think, and more often.

You won't get the results you want, the job you went for, or the partner you 'knew' was for you.

And that will change you.

The events themselves aren't really the important part of your interactions with the world.

It's how those events change you. Shape you. What gets chipped off or bent sideways. 

Some you'll shrug off. Others will shake or break you. Maybe. Like Dr Frost. 

Or my grandad dying. Or my mum dying. Or my brother dying. 

Yeah, people you love dying is really hard, NGL. Especially when they don't know Jesus.

What would Jesus do?

Failure happens when reality's outcomes don't match YOUR plan.

Jesus didn't have a plan of his own. Sure, he wanted stuff - he was fully human.

But he stuck with The Plan, no matter what. Why wouldn't you?

God's plans never fail, since He's all-powerful and all-knowing. Why be on any other team?

Jesus stuck with God's plan. Death, full payment in blood, resurrection.

Without that, your immortal soul (the part of you you'd identify as most essentially 'you', rather than your physical body) would still be eternally separated from your Creator. 

Letting go of YOUR plan and accepting God's plan, whatever it looks like, is the only way to avoid billions of years stuck with your ugly, unpleasant, unkind, unperfected self.

You're not the Boss of you

Accept that you're not the King of your life and let God rule. In the big and the small. 

Sure, you can make decisions, go for stuff, try things. 

Don't sit in a puddle and avoid trying. Have a go.

You will fail. And that's okay. In fact, it's great!

Trust that it was the right thing, and that God is shaping you through it.

If you follow HIS plan, if you truly let Jesus be Lord, you WILL become someone amazing.

Probably not the person YOU hoped or expected to become, but certainly the best YOU that you could ever become. 

The YOU that was always in His Plan.

Romans 8:29 Conformed to his image

"For those whom he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
in order that he (Jesus) might be the firstborn
among many brothers and sisters."