The Ocean Beneath Our Failures

There is a moment familiar to anyone who has ever tried, really tried, to grow in holiness. You catch yourself in the same fault you confessed last month. Perhaps last week. Perhaps yesterday morning. A sharp word to your spouse. A wandering thought during prayer. A lustful glance that turned into something you wished it hadn't. A flash of envy when a coworker is praised.

And in that instant, something inside you collapses. Again? After all this time?

It is a strange grief, this kind of grief. Because if you examine it honestly, you will notice something curious: the fault that wounds you so deeply now is often smaller, less frequent, less serious than the faults you committed without a second thought ten years ago.

And yet today’s small failure cuts deeper than yesterday’s large ones ever did.

Why?

I want to suggest that this very phenomenon, painful as it is, is one of the surest signs that grace is doing its hidden work in you. And I want to suggest, further, that the way you respond to your failures may matter more for your sanctification than the failures themselves.

If you have ever felt that particular ache, that quiet exhaustion of fighting the same battle for the tenth or thousandth time, then this devotion is for you. Because what looks like failure to us often looks like something else entirely to God.

 

The Sea Where Sins Are Drowned

The prophet Micah, at the close of his book, asks one of the most astonished questions in all of Scripture: "Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." (Micah 7:18-19).

Take a moment with that final image. The depths of the sea.

In the ancient Hebrew imagination, the sea was not merely large—it was the place of chaos, the abyss, the unfathomable. To the dry-land peoples of Israel, the sea was an alien world, vast beyond reckoning, where things sank and were never seen again.

The Hebrew word for “depths” here is metsulot, used elsewhere to describe the place where Pharaoh’s chariots were drowned, where Jonah cried out from “the heart of the seas” (Jonah 2:3).

Still today, the deepest part of the oceans remain something of a mystery. Humans have directly observed less than 0.001% of the deep ocean floor. Even with the aid of sonar technology, we've only charted about 28.7% of the global seafloor.

Still today, the ocean remains something of a mystery to us. Its vastness, its inaccessibility, is too great for us–even with all our brilliant inventions, submarines, and sonar, to fully comprehend. Scientists estimate that between 1.5 million and 3.5 million marine species remain undiscovered.

Staggering, isn't it?

This is where God puts your sins.

Not in a ledger. Not in a file He occasionally reviews. He hurls them—the verb in Micah carries a sense of vigorous casting—into a depth from which they cannot be retrieved. And notice the verbs that surround this action: He delights in clemency. He tramples iniquity underfoot, as a conqueror would trample a defeated enemy.

God is not reluctantly forgiving you; He is enthusiastically warring against the very sins that grieve you.

The drop of your sin is real. But it falls into an ocean of mercy and love infinitely greater and more vast than even the actual oceans of the earth.

 

The Number That Matters

Consider the saints. We tend to imagine them as people who, at some point, simply stopped sinning—who crossed a threshold of holiness after which the struggle ended and the halo descended, accompanied by choirs of angels and a shower of golden glitter.

But this is not what we find when we read their own words.

St. Teresa of Ávila wrote in her Life: “I was more afraid of the obligation that I was under to enter a religious life than of all the troubles in the world.” She describes years of mediocrity, of a divided heart, of falling and rising and falling again. Even after profound mystical experiences, a voice from Jesus warning her to separate herself from a friend who was leading her astray, she continued to meet with the friend for years.

Talk about stubborn!

You and I like to think that if Jesus appeared in our bedroom, and told us, "you better stop," that we'd actually stop.

Well, here's at least one saint—considered one of the greatest of saints, called a Doctor of the Church—who did not stop for years.

What made the saints saints was not the absence of falls but the persistence of return.

It was not the number of their sins that defined them, but the number of times they turned back.

Every sin, every failure, every prayer abandoned to distraction becomes—if we choose it—an opportunity. A small act of the will, choosing God again, often weakly, often tearfully, often with no felt consolation. And it is precisely these acts, accumulated over a lifetime, that constitute sanctity.

So what if you were distracted a hundred times during your prayer time? Such became, from a different perspective, a hundred times when with an act of the will you returned to God in love.

Not a hundred distractions. A hundred movements of love.

So what if you've indulged in a particular passion of the flesh five thousand times, and you did it again just today. That you lament it at all is a good sign. And in that compunction, in that act of repentance, you had five-thousand-plus opportunities to with full will return to His grace.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux understood this perhaps better than anyone. She insisted that holiness was not made of dramatic conquests but of countless small returns. She wrote: “I am not always faithful, but I never get discouraged. I leave myself in the arms of our Lord” (Letters of St. Thérèse, LT 89). She saw her own weakness clearly—she did not pretend it away—but she refused to let it become a wall between herself and God. Instead, she made it a doorway.

God does His most beautiful work not in our strengths but in our acknowledged poverty.

 

Why the Struggle Remains

But here a question presses in. If God can sanctify us, why does He so often leave the same sin in place? Why do some souls struggle with the same temptation, the same besetting weakness, for fifty or sixty years? Surely a single touch from the Almighty could uproot it forever.

St. John of the Cross addresses this mystery throughout his writings. In The Dark Night, he explains that God permits the soul’s ongoing experience of its own weakness precisely so that pride may not take root. The soul that has been delivered from every visible flaw will inevitably begin to admire itself. But the soul that knows—really knows, in the daily evidence of its own falls—that it cannot stand on its own, that soul learns dependence.

And dependence, for John of the Cross, is the seed of union with God.

He writes that “the endurance of darkness is preparation for great light” (The Dark Night, Book II). The struggle is not a delay on the road to holiness; it is the road. The same is true of the recurring sin, the lingering weakness, the temptation that returns again and again and again.

In each return, God is teaching us something we could learn nowhere else: that He loves us still. That our sin has not dampened his love for us.

He knows, though, that sometimes the greater sin is the pride we'd entertain if the struggle was removed. He would rather you commit the same fault of passion again than to think you'd achieved something that would become an occasion for the more insidious sin of pride.

St. Paul knew this. He begged three times for the thorn to be removed, and instead heard: ”My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul did not get healing. He got something better: a permanent felt poverty that became the soil of his apostolate.

God knows our weakness. He knows the deepest desire of our heart, often hidden even from ourselves beneath layers of distraction and disordered loves.

He knows that the movements of our flesh are not who we truly desire to be.

And He allows the struggle because, through it, we learn to love. 

We learn dependence. We learn that our value is not in our performance.

It is the endurance through the struggle, not the absence of it, that sanctifies.

 

The Strange Pain of Healing

There is another phenomenon worth naming, one that often confuses those who are sincerely trying to grow. A sin that ten years ago was a daily occurrence may now occur only once every few weeks. By any objective measure, this is enormous progress. The soul has been substantially transformed.

And yet, that single occurrence often strikes us with far more compunction than all the daily sins ever did.

We feel worse about our occasional fall than we used to feel about our constant ones. We are tempted to read this as evidence that we are not progressing—or even that we are getting worse. But this reading is exactly backward.

The increased pain over a diminished sin is itself a sign of growth.

The soul has become more sensitive to God’s presence, more attuned to the subtleties of love, more aware of what sin actually costs in the friendship with Christ.

A child who eats candy and ice cream regularly will barely notice any difference when he takes another bite. An adult who has been watching her diet, eating raw foods for months, might feel her stomach turn with a single swallow of the ice cream.

St. Teresa of Ávila spoke of how, in the higher mansions of the Interior Castle, the soul becomes capable of being wounded by faults that previously would have gone unnoticed.

This is not a regression but a refinement. The Holy Spirit has been at work, tuning the strings of the soul to finer frequencies of love.

A splash of spilled of coffee on a black shirt is barely noticeable, and will cause no concern. But if you're wearing a white shirt, and you spill a single drop on it, you'll notice the stain, you'll try to scrub it anxiously, you might even feel compelled to change lest someone see the stain and think you're a slob.

When you were in black, the quantity of the coffee spilled might be greater, but not seem like a big deal. When you were wearing white, the spill can be much smaller, but it causes more distress.

We must, therefore, learn to be grateful for the progress, even as we grieve the lingering wound. Both responses are appropriate. Both can coexist. What we must not do is allow the sharper pain over the smaller sin to convince us that we have not moved at all.

It may just be that we are wearing whiter garments than we used to. It may just be that our soul is purer than it used to be.

When it comes to coffee stains, we might be tempted to think, "Well, I'll just go back to wearing black again whenever I'm drinking coffee." When it comes to sin, though, that's exactly the wrong move. But many people feel that temptation, and it's the devil, not your sin, that's screaming at you: "you've really made no progress at all."

 

Practical Counsel for the Returning Heart

How then shall we live in the light of this struggle? Let me offer several practices that flow from these truths.

First, when you fall, return immediately. Do not allow shame to lengthen the distance between you and God. Shame is a tactic, not a virtue. The longer you stay away after a fall, the more your fall convinces you that staying away is what you deserve. Return at once, even if only with a whispered Jesus, mercy. The act of returning is itself the beginning of holiness.

Wash out the stain quickly, before it gets a chance to set in.

Second, count returns, not failures. Keep no inventory of how often you have fallen. Keep instead a quiet awareness of how often you have turned back. This is the number that matters in eternity. Each return is a small “yes” to God, and a thousand small yeses are how a saint is made.

Third, when the recurring sin strikes you with disproportionate pain, name it as a sign of growth. Tell yourself plainly: “The fact that this hurts me so much is evidence that I have been transformed. The old me would not have noticed.” Then bring the wound to God without dramatizing it.

Fourth, meditate often on Micah’s image. When you confess, picture your sins not piling up in front of you but plunging into an ocean. The drop is real. The ocean is infinitely greater. Make this image part of your prayer.

Fifth, learn from your falls without dwelling on them. Ask: what was happening before this? What did I neglect? What did I let slide? Make a small adjustment—a little more rest, a little less of a particular input, a little more time with Scripture in the morning. But don't dwell on a thousand little "fixes" out of anxiety. That's another trap, entirely. Sometimes, with spiritual disicplines, it's less about the number of them than the love in which we do them. It is better to say a single prayer with deep love than a thousand prayers in a cold routine, as if checking them off a list.

Make adjustments, things that move you more toward love, then move on. Don't dwell on your failure. Long analysis of past sins is often pride wearing the mask of contrition.

Sixth, trust that the struggle itself is forming you. The very fact that you are wrestling means that you are not asleep. The soul that has stopped struggling is the soul in real danger, not the soul that fights and falls and rises again. Your weariness is not failure. Your weariness is proof that you are still in alive on the battlefield.

And for us, for Christians, the war was already won. These battles we're engaging in are skirmishes, the last-ditch efforts of the enemy who has already lost to try and inflict a few more wounds on the army of God's saints before he's finally buried. Trust Him who has achieved the victory, and finish the fight certain that you are persisting not at risk of defeat, but toward an already determined victory.

Trust Him who has achieved the victory, and finish the fight certain that you are persisting not at risk of defeat, but toward an already determined victory.

History is filled with tragic examples of armies that had mathematically won a conflict, only to throw it away because they panicked at a beaten enemy’s final, desperate gasp.

Consider the Battle of Samar in 1944. A massive, overwhelmingly superior Japanese fleet—led by the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built at that time—intercepted a tiny, unprotected group of American escort carriers and destroyers known as "Taffy 3."

The Americans were on the absolute brink of total annihilation; they were completely outgunned, slow, and trapped.

Knowing they had lost, the American destroyers made a desperate, almost suicidal final move: they charged directly into the teeth of the giant Japanese battleships, firing everything they had left.

Objectively, the Japanese had already won. Had they simply pushed forward, they would have wiped out the American forces entirely.

But the sheer, ferocious audacity of this last-ditch effort tricked the Japanese commander, Admiral Kurita. He panicked, misinterpreting their desperate aggression as the arrival of a much larger, unbeatable fleet. In one of the most baffling and foolish decisions of naval history, Kurita ordered his superior, victorious fleet to turn around and retreat.

This is exactly what happens in the spiritual life when we allow a sudden setback or a heavy wave of temptation to make us retreat from God.

It's what the devil does when he attacks you, still.

The enemy is defeated. The cross has already secured the outcome. When the broken, dying remnants of your old sins launch a fierce, desperate counter-attack, do not mistake their noise for strength. Do not foolishly retreat from a battlefield where Christ has already won the day. Stand firm, remember the true state of the war, and keep moving forward in love.

 

The Final Word

Return, then. Return today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Return when the sin is large and when it is small. Return when you understand yourself and when you do not.

Every drop falls into the same ocean. Every return is received by the same Father, who delights in showing clemency, who tramples iniquity underfoot, who has been waiting at the door the whole time you thought yourself far away.

It is not the failures that define you. It is the return. And the ocean into which your sins disappear is deeper than anything you could imagine.