What Dunkirk Can Teach Us About Finding Victory in Failure

Last updated on: November 8, 2017 at 11:53 am by Paul Asay

What Dunkirk Can Teach Us About Finding Victory in Failure 2017-11-08T11:53:10-06:00 Paul Asay

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What Dunkirk Can Teach Us About Finding Victory in Failure-2

Fionn Whitehead in Dunkirk, photo courtesy Warner Bros.

Never surrender.

We can never guarantee victory in any area of our lives, but we can guarantee defeat … by quitting. By surrendering. By embracing despair and pulling it in.

What’s the point? We say. What hope do we have? But there is hope, if we’re brave enough to see and follow it. Part of our brains may whisper it’s a fool’s hope. But so, perhaps, did many on the beaches of Dunkirk.

Some people believe that Christianity is a ward against depression and despair—a talisman that will protect us from mental illness and suicide. We’ll be magically healed if we embrace the faith. We’ll be saved.

Maybe that’s true for some people, but not for me. Not for many people who labor through life while worshipping our shared God. Anxiety and depression is sometimes ignored in our little world, waved away as a sign of weakness or of an unsure faith.

But even though Christianity is no magic bullet, it still holds my key for hope.

The pages of the Bible are filled with defeat. It opens with the Fall of Creation itself, swiftly followed by murders and floods. Towers fall. Tablets are broken. Nations are destroyed. And when God Himself comes down to help us, we kill Him. We beat Him and mocked Him and nailed Him to a cross and threw Him in a tomb. “Darkness came over the whole land,” Luke tells us, “for the sun stopped shining.”

Defeat. Despair. How much the people in the Bible would’ve longed for a reset button. How tempting it must’ve been to quit.

But then, we see it: Death leads to life. Dark leads to dawn. Every defeat sows the seeds for victory. Every blow we suffer gives us a chance to pick ourselves up, pull ourselves together and fight on.

Never surrender.

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