Nothing Is Wasted

On December 21, 2015, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster descended from space and landed upright at Cape Canaveral — the first time in history an orbital rocket booster had returned home intact. What the cameras captured was triumph. What they didn't show was the string of failed attempts that came before it: boosters tipping over on drone ships in the Atlantic, legs failing to lock, rockets tumbling into the sea in slow-motion fire.

What made SpaceX different wasn't that they avoided failure. It was what they did with it. Engineers downloaded every sensor reading from each crash — altitude, velocity, fuel burn, fin angle — and fed that data back into the next attempt. The failures weren't wasted. They were curriculum.

The apostle Paul would have understood this entirely. In Romans 5, he writes that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." He doesn't say suffering produces answers right away. He says it produces something better first: the capacity to keep going.

There will be seasons in your faith when you feel like you're exploding on the landing pad. The prayer goes unanswered. The marriage doesn't heal the way you hoped. The calling feels stalled. But none of it is wasted data. God is downloading something from every failed attempt — patience you didn't have before, compassion for others who are struggling, a deeper dependence on Him rather than your own calculations.

Keep flying. The landing is coming.