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If I Fail, I Fail Believing

In December 2024, I was finishing my Master of Theological Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, still carrying the undivided goal that had brought me from Kenya to the United States: do a PhD. So I submitted five doctoral applications.

That Christmas, I preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church at Yale University and, hopeful as I was, I read the invitation to celebrate the carols Eucharist there as a little foreshadowing of my triumphant return as a Yale PhD student the following year. Surely providence was leaking the plot early. I had already interviewed with Yale and Princeton, which was no mean achievement after making their shortlists from hundreds of applicants. And I figured I had a fair shot elsewhere too.

Then March came. The decisions began trickling in, each bearing some variation of we regret to inform you. Apparently there was plenty of regret to go around. By the time the last letter arrived, the arithmetic was painfully simple: five applications, five rejections.

I had not gotten into a single PhD program. I was blanked!

That created an uncomfortable theological problem. It wasn’t that I had stopped believing God could perform a miracle. If God truly is God, and if He can do what He wishes (and those are actually two different propositions) then surely getting me into a doctoral program is not where omnipotence finally meets its match.

The problem was believing again.

I had believed before. I had prayed, worked, waited and hoped. Now I felt like someone being asked to fall in love again immediately after heartbreak. Go ahead. Trust again. Really?

If there is a most authentic thing I know about faith, it is that faith is vulnerable. Hope exposes the heart. And once hope bruises you, pessimism begins to look surprisingly intelligent. As a young man, I learned something about love: whenever I convinced myself that a woman I loved could never love me back, I also knew she could never break my heart. I would be ready when she rejects me. That is, if I even bothered to shoot my shot in the first place. If I stop expecting anything from God, perhaps God can stop disappointing me. There is a strange comfort in expecting nothing.

Which brings me to one of the strangest scenes in Scripture.

Samaria is under siege in 2 Kings 6. The famine has become horrific. A woman cries to the king after she and another woman agree, in their desperation, to eat their children. When the king hears what has happened, he tears his robes, and underneath the robes is sackcloth.

That detail arrests me. The king has been carrying his dying city secretly in prayer. Under those royal robes has been fasting, desperation, perhaps repentance. And nothing has changed. The siege continues. People are starving. God has not shown up.

Something in the king snaps. Like an overwhelmed African soul that has toiled for two years to put in five doctoral applications and seen them run through his fingers like dust.

“May God deal with me, be it ever so severely, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today.”

Yes. Bring me the prophet’s head. I am tired.

As an African student in the US, I understand King Jehoram’s pain. Not because I feel like beheading anybody. Let the record show that all prophets and professors who encouraged me to apply are perfectly safe. But I understand the place from which the king’s statement comes. It is the scorched-earth reaction of disappointed faith: If this business isn’t working, what exactly are we doing? I wore the sackcloth. I prayed. I waited. I fasted. I believed. And this is where we are?

Then to hell with the sackcloth. I don’t want another sermon. I don’t want another prophecy. I don’t want another testimony about somebody who waited seventeen years and then God suddenly came through. I am tired of trying, tired of waiting, tired of God, tired of church, tired of being told to hold on just a little longer.

You know what? “Rebellion” sounds too strong a word for this because rebellion suggests that the king has suddenly come to hate God. But this is something more intimate. It is the exhaustion of someone who trusted and feels that trust has been betrayed. It is the young man who has prayed for a job and is still unemployed; the young woman who has trusted for marriage and no longer wants another sermon about “God’s best”; the couple who prayed for a child; the farmer who prayed for rain. There comes a point when disappointment stops asking, Where is God? and starts asking, Why am I still doing this?

I recognize that king.

He sends for Elisha’s head. And typical of Elisha, the preacher has the audacity to preach again. The prophet who is about to be beheaded for preaching has another sermon. “Hear the word of the LORD.” By this time tomorrow, he says, food will be plentiful.

Tomorrow? The city is starving today.

One officer laughs. Even if God opened the windows of heaven, could such a thing happen? Again, I understand him too. When you have been disappointed badly enough, hope begins to sound unserious. There are times in my life when I have wanted to tell hopeful people, Please don’t prophesy to me right now. Just sit here. Because sometimes what hurts is not simply that the miracle has not happened. It is having to keep imagining that it might.

Now, the most interesting turn is where story changes scenes.

Four lepers sit outside the city gate. Behind them is famine; ahead is the Aramean army. And one asks a wonderfully simple question: “Why stay here until we die?” Their logic is a brutally simple one: If they stay, they die. If they return to Samaria, they die. So they decide to walk toward the enemy. Perhaps the Arameans will spare them. If not, well, they were dying anyway.

There is no great declaration of faith or encouragement, or even prayer before they start off. They simply get up and walk. But what they don’t know is that God has made their timid approach sound like an invasion, and the Arameans have fled, abandoning their tents, horses, food, gold. The lepers know none of this. They walk toward what they think might kill them and discover an empty camp. The men who woke up wondering where they would die are suddenly deciding where to hide their gold.

And that is where their story meets mine.

If I am going to fail, I will fail whether I believe or not. Pessimism cannot protect me from rejection.  Again, what exactly am I protecting by refusing to hope? Is it my pride? Is it perhaps the embarrassment of admitting that I believed God for something and it didn’t happen? The shame of confessing that I loved and got heart-broken?

But there are worse things than failing while believing. The four lepers actually knew they could have died. And suppose they died, at least they could have said, We got up and went to at least see.

As a Bible-believing Christian, I don’t have to manufacture certainty or to baptize my desires and call them prophecy. And I don’t have to pretend rejection doesn’t frighten me. Faith may be smaller and stranger than that. But perhaps faith is simply refusing to let yesterday’s disappointment decide that I will never walk again.

And there is something in this story I cannot shake. The king was tearing his robes and God was already doing something outside the city. He was ordering Elisha’s execution and the Arameans were fleeing from lepers. While the officer was laughing at the possibility of abundance, tents full of food sat unattended at an empty war camp. And the four lepers? Imagine them walking toward what they thought might be their death when they were actually walking toward breakfast.

I have read this story so many times in my life, and I can tell you why: it’s because I have failed so many times and on many occasions those failures have felt like my faith was betrayed. And I have kept coming back to this story. Then there is this thought I remember from some of my earliest readings. That perhaps God sometimes waits until we snap before He acts. Until the sackcloth becomes unbearable and the faithful person finally says, Enough. I am tired.

I don’t know if that is good theology. I am not even sure the story allows me to say that God was waiting for the king to break. But the timing has always troubled me. The king tears his robes, gives up on the sackcloth, orders the prophet’s head, and almost immediately, the story turns. It makes me wonder whether there are moments when what looks like the collapse of faith is really the collapse of our ability to keep performing faith. Perhaps sometimes we reach the end of our religious strength before discovering that God’s action was never being held together by our strength in the first place.

The story marches towards a beautiful close. Nobody at the gate knew what had happened in the camp. Do you see how we make our judgments from the gate when God alone knows what is happening in the camp?

Whether I knew how I did it, or whether any of this explains why, I prayed again. I risked wanting the PhD again. And in the next application window, I allowed myself the dangerous privilege of hope, not because I knew what awaited me in the camp or because my faith was stronger this time. In fact, I can confess that in this second round I was so resigned that I simply offered one-line prayers, unlike the first time. But I refused to sit at the gate and slowly die from a future I had invented in my head. With the tiny, almost nonexistent faith of four lepers who simply decided to go and find out, I applied again.

And this time, I got into my first-choice PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary.

That is why I will go on! And it is why I urge you to rise up. And no, you don’t need any greater faith than the unnoticeable one the lepers had. You have enough to rise and walk. Let’s go and see. If there are soldiers there, we will meet them. If there is disappointment there, we will survive it. If we fail, let us fail believing.

But there is also this other possibility that we may tremble toward the thing we fear, reach the edge of the camp, push aside the flap of the first tent and call out. No answer. Push aside the flap of another. Still no answer.

And then, only then, we may discover that God has been there ahead of us all along.