Try and Try and Try

During yesterday’s church service, we had the boys brigade over for the youth service. My church takes a certain company of the boys brigade from a certain secondary school under its wings, and from time to time, they have certain functions and ceremony held in the church. I have interacted with such a group of boys brigade before when my former discipleship group mentor held the Alpha course for them. Not everyone of them are Christians, but there is certainly a drive within the Boy’s Brigade to bring these members to Christianity.

So before the service commenced yesterday, there was this group of people whom I have not seen in church before who were advertising for a programme for youths below the age of 20 to come for this event called Playmax. It was targeted at the Boy’s Brigade and those younger members within the youth service. Two girls and a boy who were probably from a sister Lutheran church who were participating in the event came forward in the hall to feature a song that they would be singing for their programme. It had the lyrics for the chorus, “Where there is desire there is going to be a flame, where there is a flame someone’s bound to get burned, but just because it burns doesn’t mean you’re going to die, you’ve gotta get up and try try try, gotta get up and try try try.”

I thought it had a nice tune to it, and I did a quick check on my ipad for the lyrics and discovered that it was a song by the US artist Pink. It seems to be a song talking about the value of perseverance when one does not achieve the things he or she sought to obtain. It got me wondering though what is the Christian view with regards to failure in life. For example, things like failure in school or in work. Do we talk about the virtue of perseverance like how contemporary self-help philosophy promotes? For I hear from my Christian circle a certain disavowing first of all, of personal desires or interest as being wrong. “Serve God first in your heart, and not money and all the other things.” I am told. So if there is anything that I suspect certain Christians there would find dubious about Pink’s song, it is this presence of an overpowering desire within someone, analogous to a flame that burns. It probably sounds a lot like a sin of greed and pride. My Christian friends would talk of failure as simply that not being God’s will for one in life. I don’t hear as much of a ‘try and try again’ approach to failure. And I don’t read much about how to deal with failures in one’s life from the bible. Like it doesn’t address things like failure in school or in work, and I have no doubt that Christians experience these things in their life in society.

So ought we to say when we experience repeated failures, “try and try again”, or “This be God’s will, accept it”?

Anyway, I went to look for the music video on youtube when I was at home after the church service. Truthfully, I can’t understand the relevancy of the music video by pink to the lyrics of the song. It shows the singer Pink with this rather ripped dude dancing in a rather physically abusive tango towards each other. But I went to click on this version by this two asian girls calling themselves Jayesslee who did a duet on the song, and I must say I like their version of the song so much more. In addition to their beautiful vocals and harmony, I think they are really beautiful too.