What is failure?
We had many enjoyable and edifying conversations with the pastor we stayed with in southern Nepal. One theme that he returned to on a number of occasions is that with God, we have to redefine our concepts of success and failure. As he puts it, “what is failure?”.
The pastor told us there have been many times in his twenty-five years of ministry where he has apparently failed in the attempt of doing God's will, from the many hard years he and his wife spent rebuilding the mission centre to the difficulties of establishing home churches in remote places. But all of these instances have given him a different perspective on failure. He says that if we are genuinely pursuing the will of God, there won’t be success and failure in the way we normally think, because God has already won victory and He is all-powerful and we are just trying our best to follow His will in our life. So instead of being paralysed by the fear of failure or consumed by the pursuit of success, we can rest in the peace of knowing that if our desire for God is genuine and we have no other motivation than to please Him, there won't be success or failure in the way we understand those terms.
We experienced this approach when what was meant to be a three-day outreach trip into the mountains with the pastor and his wife turned into a one-day circular drive back to where we had started. Four hours into our journey we were driving on sketchy dirt roads which snaked up the side of the mountains when it began to pour with rain, transforming the next ascent into a muddy river which our two-wheel drive vehicle couldn't continue on, despite many attempts. Eventually we had to turn around and head back down the mountain. As we drove back to the mission centre the pastor was receiving calls from the believers we had planned to meet, beseeching him to try to come some other way as they had already prepared food and beds for us. It was hard not to feel like the trip was a total failure, but it was lovely to witness how the pastor and his wife were not dejected despite being disappointed. And because of this, we could enjoy the many hours in the car as a further time of fellowship together, knowing that if and when God wanted us to visit that particular place He would make a way.
This view of success and failure also feels important for us to learn after our experiences dealing with Nepali airports and internal flights. After our first few days in Kathmandu, our plan was to go to Pokhara for two nights to visit friends-of-friends. But Pokhara airport kept closing for all arrivals and departures due to heavy smoke from forest fires, causing long delays. We feared we would get stuck in Pokhara and lose time with the pastor and his wife at the southern mission which was the main reason we went to Nepal.
These might all seem like logical concerns, but only if our human definitions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are correct. We were assuming that ‘success’ was more time with the pastor and his wife, and ‘failure’ would be getting stuck in Pokhara due to weather. In reality, we were in Nepal for God and, more importantly, with God. For all we knew, being stuck in Pokhara would be God’s will for us. Unless we sensed the Holy Spirit was saying otherwise, we could just relax and trust that we were with God.
But if we're being honest, we were not very relaxed during this situation! We got frustrated with each other, snapping and getting emotional, feeling trapped by the curse of unknowing: was it wise to remain in Kathmandu for two more nights, or would we regret not going to Pokhara if it turned out that the airport opened and the weather improved? There wasn't a clear resolution to this question because we could not predict the future.
It got to a point where we had decided to leave the airport and stay in Kathmandu, giving up our trip to Pokhara. Just as we were about to leave, an airport employee rushed over to us and insisted that we board the plane as the Pokhara airport was now open. In a matter of seconds he had printed our boarding passes, checked our luggage, and we were rushed through security and onto the plane. Although the plane then sat on the runway for another twenty-five minutes, we felt a strange kind of peace descend, a realisation that if we were with God then we could trust that God’s will would be done in our lives for as long as we remained committed to follow Him alone.
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As it turned out, on the same day we arrived in Pokhara, the long-awaited rains came which helped dampen the fires and clear the smoke, and on the day we left our flight departed pretty much on time, which is apparently a miracle in Nepal. The irony was that we were then delayed for four hours in Kathmandu as the rains which had cleared the smoke in Pokhara had closed the southern airport where the pastor was meeting us! Which just goes to show that our definitions of failure and success are so often short-sighted and misguided because only God sees the whole picture and only He knows where He wants us to go and how He wants us to get there.