My husband and I sent out an email begging supporters to pray for an unprecedented opportunity at the refugee center where I taught.  

Half our students were Muslim, and for one week, classes would be superseded by the Jesus film in native tongues. We’d serve popcorn and have translators available to help us field questions. 

But when I arrived, adrenaline-filled, the head teacher had inexplicably insisted on extended exams for the students before the film was shown. Students were restless, late for after-class jobs. 

I’d spent weeks smoothing details. I’d set aside a day of fasting.  

Supporters asked for updates. I felt empty-handed.  

In my mind, the Gospel had been sidelined by an agenda. Didn’t these plans–for salvation!–matter?  

But I remembered a friend’s words. She’d adopted twins, only to open her family to exquisite pain alongside all the benefits. “I think in my naïveté, I assume if I obey what I think God is clearly placing on my heart, he will ‘reward’ me somehow with happiness and not trouble,” she’d written.  

Her honesty pierced me. How often have I obeyed God, stepping out of whatever boat, assuming I’d be transmogrified into Teflon?  

I am the Israelites, plowing headlong into battle with the Ark of the Covenant as a substitute rabbit’s foot.  

I forget the God-authored destinies of the prophets; of Jesus himself; of the 11 disciples. Deaths looking like sheer failure. 

Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote,  

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. 

… The big results are not in your hands or mine.… All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.” 

Maybe this finds you rubbing your thumbs over a failure, wondering if you’ve misread God’s guidance. Or, worse, that he led you headlong into failure. 

Take heart from the Resurrection’s pattern: we expect not only the Cross, but someday, somehow, victory.