As most of you don’t know, before my squad launched to Costa Rica, I was asked to be a raised up logistics leader. And I said yes, with the question, “why me?” at the front of my mind and having not much of an idea of what the job would actually entail.
Come to find out, logistics in a covid world is a little more complicated than normal. My two other logistics partners and I get one day a week to find the best wifi we can to get all the tasks done that we are given. We have had many full days at coffee shops with our computers on the table, our phones in hand, and too many tabs open to count. Logistics has looked like logging receipts, planning adventure days for our squad, booking transportation, getting 25 people through the check in line at an airport, phone calls in broken Spanish, managing budgets, announcing exciting information to the squad, and sending an overwhelming amount of emails to our squad mentor. It’s funny to think that they trust three, barely adults with so many important moving parts. I am honoured to say the least.
When I said yes to being apart of the logistics team, one of my first prayers was that God would let me fail. Bold, right? Well, I decided that I would rather fail then continue to let success define my identity like it has most of my life. In the first three months of my race, God gave me the space to recognise that a lot of my self worth has actually been attached to my own abilities and success instead of being rooted in Him. And because of this, I actually fear stepping into a lot of small moments and opportunities and positions because I am afraid of failure.
So I came to the conclusion that I don’t want failure to continue to stop me from the fullness of what God has for me; do the things you fear and fear will lose control over you.
And the funniest part about this prayer is that I completely forgot about it until the Lord literally answered my request for failure.
It all happened this past week, which was our squad’s debrief (essentially a few days of rest and processing in the mountains of Costa Rica before transitioning to the Dominican Republic for another two and a half months of ministry). One of the things the logistics team was in charge of was planning for the adventure day. We had a budget to book and plan all the details of something fun that we thought the squad would enjoy doing. We started planning it about three weeks in advance, meaning we had about three logistics days that we could use to put all the details together.
After spending hours researching places like volcanoes, waterfalls, and theme parks, we came to the conclusion that every fun outdoorsy place was way too far out of the way to even consider going to. This was frustrating, but we kept researching and decided after a list of back and forth ideas and a lot of emails that a night out for dinner in San Jose would work best because the city was only 30 minutes away. We started reaching restaurants nearby and eventually found a restaurant that was in the budget, included all the food allergy options, and was willing to seat a group of 27 people. After that we reached out to the camp to let them know that we wouldn’t need to be fed dinner that night since we would be going out. They confirmed that with us, so we reached out to a contact we have at AIM to help us book the transportation. At this point in time, it was the end of our last logistics day before leaving to debrief, so we were right on track to getting everything confirmed.
As we were finishing up, an email came in about transportation that said something along the lines of, “You need to pick a new restaurant because this one is too far out of the way.”
So we went back and double checked the addresses and google maps still stated that it was only about a half an hour away from our debrief location. We were about to send an emil back proclaiming that we were right, when another email from the same lady came in that stated the address of our debrief location.
That’s where we came to the real conclusion that we had been very wrong on something. The whole time. The past three weeks we had been using the completely wrong address for the location we were going to be staying at, and that meant everything that had been confirmed for adventure day went down the drain. We were now at square negative one because not only was there no longer anything planned for that day, there was also no plans to feed the squad dinner because we already confirmed with the camp that we wouldn’t need dinner that night.
If I ever had the thought that God doesn’t listen to my prayers, that thought no longer existed at that moment.
At that point we were back at base after a long logistics day, but we did what we could in our panic that yelled, “you have four days to put together all the details of what took you three weeks to plan,” and grabbed our computers, plugged in the right address, and started searching. That evening, I think we reached out to every restaurant we could find that was relatively in our budget.
And the worst part is that after hours, no one got back to us. It was a waiting game. We woke up the next morning, and still nothing. So we went to ministry that day with hope shoved in our back pockets while praying hard that someone would answer, and when we returned that evening there was no messages, no emails, no whatsApp texts. Nothing.
At this point I was so nervous and panicked and just confused. We were leaving in two days and we had nothing planned for adventure day, and much less any dinner plans. How embarrassing? How disappointing for everyone depending on us?
We decided then that night that we would just start calling all the places we had already reached out to. We had nothing to lose. And finally, only two phone calls in but only Spanish speakers on the other end, we got our answer. A local Costa Rican buffet, only 20 minutes away, under budget, and has room for 27 people. I ran out to one of our squad leaders and told her the good news.
The rest of the adventure day we planned a last minute hike on the campus we were staying as well as some fun squad games. No, it wasn’t a volcano excursion or a day at a theme park or a hike to a clear blue waterfall that you could swim in, but it was still a day where the whole squad got to enjoy life together.
There was an adventure day not because of how good our plans were, or how much effort we put into planning, or because of our amazing logistics abilities. But because we failed. Our failure was actually a new opportunity for God to show up; our weaknesses became His strength. In our failure he brought us to a place where we had little control, and even the little control we carried we had to hand over to God trusting that His hands would make a way when ours couldn’t. And his way wasn’t plan A, or B, or even C. It was more like plan H. But it was still a way, and I trust that God’s way was exactly what we needed no matter how the others may have looked at the time.
Thanks God that our failures are never wasted when we give them to you. Thanks God that failure can never define who I am because my identity is whatever you say it is, not what I make it out to be. Thanks God that you answer my prayers, even the ones that hurt a little.
