Pursuing God’s purpose for your life will not always be a painless process. He allows us to fail in order to bring us closer to Him.

In his book, Better Than Good, Zig Ziglar tells a story of attending his three-year-old granddaughter’s dance recital. Zig watched as a group of little “pixies” fumbled through their performance but didn’t have a clue they were messing up. They were too busy having a great time, and had also never been introduced to the word “failure.”

I love that, don’t you? Kids don’t know that failure is a part of life until someone tells them. They sing, but poorly; they dance, but without rhythm, and they tell jokes that aren’t funny. But when you smile and say, “You’re amazing!” they look at you and say, “I know.”

Sadly, on the journey from being a kid to an adult, we forget that foibles while we’re dancing toward God’s dreams for our lives are okay, and that failures always precede success. After all, we all fell before we could walk and jabbered before we could talk. Why do we think that things should be different as we age? If we don’t make mistakes, we have ceased to learn. And if we insist on perfection, we may never start the journey toward our God-given purpose.

Sometimes our fear of failure is so great that we refuse to start a project without being absolutely certain of our success. It’s important to remember that giving in to the fear of failure will always destroy our motivation and productivity. True, God doesn’t give us guarantees that we won’t mess up. But He has promised His constant presence (Hebrews 13:5). And even though you won’t do everything perfectly, He will perfect what you do.

His priority isn’t always to protect you from failure; it’s to develop your faith, which He says is more precious than gold (1 Peter 1:7). This means that the failure that you think you must avoid at all costs is the very thing that He will use to strengthen you as you step into the unknown. This is what it means to have the faith of a little child. You trust that your daddy is leading and guiding you and that He will get you to your destiny, even though you feel inadequate.

This childlike trust will enable you to dance if He asks, sing when He directs, start that new organization, and go into all the world for Him. You will be willing to fumble toward greatness for God.

Won’t you dare to be like Zig’s granddaughter today?