By Kayla DeKraker
Is failure always failure? Olympian Shawn Johnson East and her husband Andrew East, a former NFL player, say no.
“I’ve experienced a ton of failure…I am grateful for it. I think one reason I’m thankful for faith is like…one of the benefits [is that it]…shapes the narrative of good things or bad things and it puts them in its proper place,” Andrew said.
He added “And so, like the failures in my mind, the stories I tell myself about them — I think because of the hope that faith brings — …if it wasn’t for X, Y, Z failures, I wouldn’t be where we are today. If it wasn’t for me getting cut by the NFL team, I wouldn’t have been home with our newborn baby girl when we had her as much as I was, you know?”
“If wasn’t for me not getting any D1 scholarships to play football, I wouldn’t have ended up at Vandy…it’s like a forging process. It’s refining, you know?” he said of failure.
Shawn noted that the examples Andrew shared aren’t really failures — they’re actually successes.
“Every failure that you tie yourself to you — I’m speaking about you specifically, not someone listening — like the ones you just listed off are actually massive successes,” she said. “And it’s an interesting psychological thing as to why the perspective you have on them is negative.”
She explained that just because something doesn’t happen in our timeline doesn’t mean it is failure.
“The pruning process is nothing more than getting rid of things that don’t matter to us because at the end of the day, it’s our family [that matters]” Shawn said.
The Easts are echoing a biblical truth found in John 15:2: “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”
Related: ‘Go to Church’: What Shawn Johnson East, Husband Wish They Knew in Their 20s
Shawn continued, “Pre-kids, I was paralyzed by the idea of failure to where I would never set myself up in any way, shape or form where I could possibly fail. And because of that, I did nothing.”
She added, “I stayed in the only thing that I knew I was good at and what I could succeed at. And I felt so handcuffed to like doing things that I didn’t love because I had all these dreams and aspirations to do more, but I was I was paralyzed by it. Post-kids, I don’t care at all, which I think is funny.”
The couple are parents to daughter Drew Hazel, 5, and sons Jett James, 3, and Barrett Madison, 1.
East previously told NBC Insider that “motherhood has taught her how to embrace the chaos and adapt when there’s no structured formula for raising her three children.”
“It’s not athletics,” she quipped. “You can’t just train kids into perfection…I feel like I’m so used to having a program, and if you just stick to the program, it works, and kids are not like that…So, the perfectionist side of me had to turn off to allow for flexibility and creativity and failure.”
As parenthood and life’s “failures” continue to prune areas in Shawn and Andrew’s lives, we can be encouraged that God will also use our life circumstances to refine us.
Read Next: ‘Greatest Time of My Life’: Shawn Johnson and Husband Andrew East Talk Parenting
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