Failed but not a failure

I am a little obsessed with the show One Tree Hill... It's a drama, its kind of dumb but I love it. My roommate and I spend many a night watching our favorite episodes that span over nine seasons. This show, might be over dramatic and at some points completely unrealistic but the funny thing is there is some great advice or quotes that come from it. Now don't let my quoting of a stupid teen drama take away from the realness of the words.
  "People are gonna label you, it's how you over come those labels. That's what matters."
Think about that. How real is that? If you really think about these labels we have to overcome, I think you will realize that there are two types of labels we must overcome. At least I did. That is the labels of other and the labels we put on ourselves. The Lord has really been teaching me this over the past year, through so many ways.
  First the labels of others, that's pretty self explanatory. I mean I do it myself, that's the super involved girl or that's the girl who always has a 4.0 or that's the ΧΩ. Like I have said before these labels aren't necessarily bad, but if we are honest what follows soon after those surface labels is that we decide to label them based on our grading scale for sin.
 This aspect of labeling goes with both the personal and public side of it. We as people  have created a "sin scale." You know what I'm talking about, we see or hear of something someone else has done and we say to ourselves "at least I'm not that bad." I sure know I do that all the time. I label myself as a good person, based on my scale of good and bad sins. But the thing is those labels I have created  mean nothing because I am just as bad as anyone else NO MATTER WHAT THEY HAVE DONE. We are all on the same desperate level of our need for God. Here is the best way I can describe it, so we see sin as if we were walking around downtown NYC with all the different sized buildings (the different heights measuring the level of sin) but God sees sin as if he was looking down from a plane (all of those buildings look equal, level)
In the book Jesus is by Judah Smith, he talks about this specifically. He says that what we must realize is that it doesn't matter how good we think we measure up, all that matters is that we realize our need for Christ. The blood that saved that murderer on death row is the same blood that saves me, because I with whatever sins I have done I  am just as separated from God as they are. Realizing the truth of this gets rid of us using labels to boost our ego, but in the same way it is important that we rid ourselves completely of them.
    In one of the Bible studies I am in we are talking about the truth that failing doesn't make you a failure. In a society where this comfort of labeling is so present, it is easy to see yourself as a failure. I have definitely struggled with this, when we are looking for approval and comfort from the successes of life we will always feel that we come up short. But because you "fail" at something that doesn't make you a failure.
  We put labels on ourselves, we put labels on others and we assume they label us, and we let those things define who we are. But if we can understand that overcoming those labels means seeing ourselves as others as The Lord sees us we have to understand that once we are believers what He sees is Jesus, He sees this perfect child that he desires and knows better than we know ourselves. He sees success, and significance.
 So like good ole One Tree Hill says "People are gonna label you, it's how you overcome those labels. That's what matters."

You are more than any circumstance or failure, you are loved by the God of the universe.