The last of the birds left Olaide’s farm on a Tuesday morning in the back of a buyer’s pickup, crated and squawking, sold for less than half of what they had cost to raise. He stood at the gate of the compound outside Sagamu and watched the vehicle bump down the laterite road until it turned onto the expressway. Then he went back inside and sat down on an upturned feed bag in the empty pen.
Eighteen months earlier he had taken early retirement from a manufacturing company in Agbara after nineteen years. With his severance package and a loan from his staff cooperative, he had leased the land, built the pens and bought three thousand point-of-lay birds. He had done a two-week course. He had a spreadsheet showing that he would recover his capital in two years. At the thanksgiving service the Sunday before he started, he had gone forward with his wife and children, and the pastor had prayed over the plans. Afterwards, beaming, Olaide had told everyone who would listen that this was God’s farm and that by the end of next year he would be employing half the young men in his street.
It went wrong in stages. Within the first year the price of a bag of feed more than doubled, and his careful spreadsheet stopped making sense. To keep going he cut costs wherever he could, and one month, when cash was very tight, he postponed a scheduled vaccination booster. Not long afterwards, disease swept through farms in the area. Olaide lost nearly a third of his flock in three weeks. The rest he nursed for a while, and then sold at a loss to stop the bleeding.
Now he owed the cooperative more than four million naira. And there was something else. When he had taken the loan, he had told his wife it was one and a half million. She did not know the real figure.
He came to see me two weeks after the pickup left. He sat with his hands between his knees and spoke quietly. “Pastor, I am a failure. Everything I touch dies. Maybe God was never in it. Maybe I have been cursed.” His brother-in-law, he added, was certain it was an attack from the village.
I asked him to slow down. “Olaide,” I said, “a plan has failed. That is real, and it hurts. But before we decide what it means about your life, let us find out what actually happened.”
A failed plan is not a verdict
When a plan collapses, we tend to jump very quickly from the event to a verdict. The business failed becomes I am a failure. The relationship ended becomes nobody will ever love me. I did not get the admission becomes God has no future for me. The ministry did not grow becomes I was never called. The leap happens almost instantly, and it feels like insight. But it is usually a conclusion reached before the evidence has been examined.
Verdicts are dangerous because they shape what we do next. A man who has decided that everything he touches dies will stop touching things. He will not try again. He will not learn. He will sit on an upturned feed bag for years. Or he may swing the other way and reach for a spiritual explanation that removes all need for reflection: it was an attack, it was a curse, it was the devil, it was the village. Either way, the opportunity to understand what happened is lost.
This teaching is about responding to failed plans with wisdom. That means making room for grief, because loss is real. It means examining honestly what went wrong, without either crushing ourselves or excusing ourselves. And it means learning to distinguish what needs repentance from what simply requires another, better-considered decision.
The heart deviseth, the Lord directeth
Proverbs has a great deal to say about plans. One verse in particular holds two truths together:
A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.
The Hebrew word translated deviseth means to think, to calculate, to plan. It is the language of reckoning and design. Proverbs does not mock planning. It assumes that a wise person thinks carefully about his way. Elsewhere it says, “Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war” (Proverbs 20:18). Olaide was not wrong to plan. He was not wrong to make a spreadsheet.
But the second half of the verse sets every human plan within a larger reality: “the LORD directeth his steps.” The word translated directeth means to establish, to make firm. Our plans are real, but they are not the final word. God’s purposes stand above them and work through them, and sometimes around them. Another proverb puts it this way: “There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the LORD, that shall stand” (Proverbs 19:21).
That has two implications when a plan fails. The first is humbling. Our plans were never as secure as we thought. No spreadsheet controls the price of feed. The second is deeply comforting. The collapse of your plan is not the collapse of God’s direction. The steps are still directed. A failed business, a lost job or a broken engagement does not mean that God has stopped guiding your life. He may be directing your steps through the very wreckage you are standing in.
Notice too that the verse says nothing about whether the plan succeeds. It does not say “a man deviseth, and if he is righteous, it will prosper.” Good people make good plans that fail. Unwise people sometimes make poor plans that succeed for a time. The success or failure of a plan is not, on its own, a reliable measure of a person’s standing with God.
The merchants and the mist
James wrote a short paragraph about plans that has much to teach anyone examining a failure:
Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil. Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.
James pictures merchants with a confident itinerary. They know which city, how long, what trade and what profit. The plan itself is ordinary business. James does not condemn travel or trade. What he exposes is a posture. “Ye know not what shall be on the morrow.” Life is a vapour, a morning mist over the fields that is gone by the time the sun is high. The proper response is to hold every plan under God’s will: “If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”
Then comes verse 16: “But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.” The word translated boastings describes pretentious, empty claims, the kind of bragging that announces outcomes before they have happened. These merchants were not merely planning. They were celebrating results they did not have, as though tomorrow belonged to them.
This gives us one honest question to ask when a plan fails. Was there presumption in the way I made it or spoke about it? Not every failed plan was presumptuous. But some were. Olaide recognised himself in verse 16 when we read it together. He had not only planned the farm. He had announced its success to the whole congregation and promised jobs to his neighbours’ sons. “I was boasting,” he said quietly, “and I called it faith.”
Then verse 17: “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” This brings a second honest question. Was there good I knew I should do, and did not do? For Olaide, that question went straight to the postponed vaccination, and further still, to the conversation with his wife that he had never had.
These two questions are not meant to load more guilt onto someone who is already hurting. They are meant to bring clarity. Sometimes the answer to both is no. You held your plans humbly, you did what you knew to do, and the plan failed anyway. That is important to know too.
Weeping until there was no more power to weep
Before we go further into analysis, we need to make room for something Scripture never skips: grief. One of the most painful moments in David’s life came before he was king, when he and his six hundred men returned to their base at Ziklag:
So David and his men came to the city, and, behold, it was burned with fire; and their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, were taken captives. Then David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep. And David’s two wives were taken captives, Ahinoam the Jezreelitess, and Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite. And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.
David’s plan had been reasonable. He had gone out with his men, leaving the town with their families. The Amalekites raided it in his absence. Everything was gone. And the first response of David and his men was to weep, “until they had no more power to weep.”
There is no rebuke for those tears. Scripture records them plainly. Grief is the right response to real loss, and failed plans often involve real loss: money, years, relationships, reputation, hope. You do not have to rush past that. You do not have to stand up in church the next Sunday and announce that all is well. You may weep.
Then the story turns. “David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him... but David encouraged himself in the LORD his God.” Notice that the failure had also turned the people against him. Failed plans often bring blame, sometimes deserved and sometimes not. In that moment David went to God. He drew strength from his relationship with the Lord before he did anything else.
And then he made a considered decision. “And David enquired at the LORD, saying, Shall I pursue after this troop? shall I overtake them?” (1 Samuel 30:8). He did not act out of panic, and he did not sink into permanent despair. He grieved, he was strengthened in God, he sought direction, and he acted.
That order is worth noticing. Grief. Strength in God. Enquiry. Action. Many of us try to skip straight to action and make rash decisions in the first weeks after a loss. Others stay in grief so long that they never reach enquiry. The path of wisdom goes through each stage.
PunchlineA failed plan deserves to be grieved and examined before it is allowed to become a verdict on your life.
Sorting the wreckage
When the first wave of grief has passed, it helps to sit down, ideally with someone wise, and sort through what happened. I have found that most failed plans contain three kinds of material, and they need to be handled differently.
The first is what was genuinely beyond your control. For Olaide, that included the sudden rise in feed prices and the outbreak of disease in the region. No one in Sagamu controlled those things. They are part of living in a fallen and unpredictable world. These need to be grieved and released, not repented of.
The second is what was unwise. Olaide had no financial buffer. He had done only a short course before investing everything. He had borrowed more than he could repay from a bad year. He postponed the vaccination. None of these were moral failures in themselves, but they were mistakes, and they need to be learned from.
The third is what was sin. For Olaide, that meant the boasting, and above all the deception of his wife. These need confession and, where possible, repair.
Let me show you why the sorting matters, using two scenes from Scripture.
When Peter met Jesus by the lake, he had just had a failed night’s work. “Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing” (Luke 5:5). Peter was a skilled fisherman. He had done what he knew how to do. Nothing in the story suggests sin. It was simply a bad night. And Jesus did not rebuke him. He told him to let down the nets again.
Contrast that with Israel’s defeat at Ai, soon after the great victory at Jericho:
And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither; for they are but few. So there went up thither of the people about three thousand men: and they fled before the men of Ai. And the men of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men: for they chased them from before the gate even unto Shebarim, and smote them in the going down: wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became as water.
The spies were confident: the city was small, there was no need to send the whole army. The attack failed badly. Joshua’s response was to fall on his face and say, “would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan!” (Joshua 7:7). That is the voice of a man who has turned a defeat into a verdict on the whole journey. But God’s answer was direct: “Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face? Israel hath sinned” (Joshua 7:10-11). One man, Achan, had taken forbidden plunder from Jericho and hidden it in his tent. The failure at Ai had a specific cause that needed to be dealt with.
Peter’s failure needed another attempt. Israel’s failure needed repentance. If Peter had spent the morning searching his soul for hidden sin, he would have tormented himself for nothing. If Joshua had simply sent a larger army back to Ai, he would have ignored the real problem. Wisdom asks which kind of failure we are dealing with, and very often the honest answer is that it is a mixture.
Paul himself had a plan fail and was criticised for it. He had intended to visit Corinth twice and changed his mind. Some accused him of being unreliable. He answered, “When I therefore was thus minded, did I use lightness?” (2 Corinthians 1:17), and he explained his reasons. A changed or failed plan is not automatically a sin. Sometimes it is simply a decision that had to be revisited in the light of new circumstances.
Repentance where it belongs
Two errors tend to cluster around failure, and they are opposites.
The first is false guilt. Some believers, especially conscientious ones, treat every failed plan as evidence of sin. They search themselves endlessly, confess things that were never wrong, and conclude that God must be punishing them. They treat a bad night’s fishing like the sin of Achan. That is crushing, and it is not true. The rising price of feed is not your sin. An economic collapse is not your sin. Another person’s betrayal is not your sin.
The second is excused guilt. Here the real wrong is renamed so that it does not have to be faced. Deception becomes “managing information”. Boasting becomes “speaking faith”. Negligence becomes “the devil’s attack”. I believe in the reality of spiritual warfare, and I would never dismiss it. But when we attribute every failure to an enemy outside ourselves, we lose the chance to see what God may be showing us inside. Olaide’s brother-in-law meant well. But blaming the village would have kept Olaide from the conversation he most needed to have.
Where sin is present, the gospel gives us a clear and wonderful way forward. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). John writes, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). You do not need to carry the failure as a permanent stain. Christ has already borne it. Confession brings it into the light, where it can be forgiven and dealt with.
And repentance usually has a human direction too. Olaide needed to tell his wife the truth about the loan. That would be harder than anything he had faced at the farm. But it was the one part of the failure that was entirely within his power to put right.
Pressing on from a collapsed plan
Paul knew what it was to have a life plan collapse. Before he met Christ, he had a clear path: a Pharisee of the strictest kind, zealous, advancing beyond his peers, blameless in the righteousness of the law (Philippians 3:5-6). Then Christ met him on the Damascus road, and the whole plan fell apart. “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ” (Philippians 3:7).
And even after his conversion, his plans kept being overturned. He wrote to the Romans of a journey he hoped to make to Spain (Romans 15:24, 28); we do not know for certain whether he ever went. When he wrote to the Philippians, he was in chains, a situation no missionary would have planned. Yet he wrote that “the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel” (Philippians 1:12). It was from that place of disrupted plans that he wrote these words: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12).
NuggetThere are two things here that speak directly to a person whose plan has failed.
First, Paul never claimed to have arrived. “I count not myself to have apprehended” (Philippians 3:13). A failure is less devastating to someone who never believed his own success was the measure of his life. Paul’s sense of worth did not rest on a plan going well. It rested on the fact that Christ had taken hold of him.
Second, look at what Paul is pressing towards. “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). The mark is not a particular plan. It is not a farm, a ministry, a career or a marriage. It is the upward call of God in Christ. That means a failed plan cannot disqualify you from the race that matters most. You can lose a business and still be pressing towards the prize. You can be in chains in Rome and still be running.
And between those two verses is the phrase “this one thing I do”, followed by “forgetting those things which are behind.” After a failure, this forgetting does not mean pretending it never happened, and it certainly does not mean skipping the learning. It means refusing to let the failure define your direction. You examine it, you learn from it, you repent where repentance is needed, and then you turn your face forward.
Another considered decision
The prophet Micah wrote in a time of national collapse, when it seemed that everything had failed:
Therefore I will look unto the LORD ; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me. Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.
“When I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.” Micah does not deny the fall or the darkness. He simply refuses to let them be the end. His confidence rests on the Lord, who is present even in the dark.
Rising again does not always mean rebuilding the same thing. After a failed plan, there are usually several possible next steps. You might try again, with the lessons learned. You might try something similar in a different way. You might decide to do something else entirely. Each can be a faithful choice. The point is to make the next decision carefully, not in panic and not in despair.
Some practical wisdom may help. Avoid making large new decisions in the first raw weeks of loss, unless circumstances force you to. Seek counsel from people who understand both your situation and the field you are working in. Ask what the failure has taught you about your gifts, your limits and your habits. And remember the Preacher’s counsel: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that” (Ecclesiastes 11:6). The uncertainty that made your last plan fail is also a reason to keep sowing. You cannot know in advance which effort God will bless.
If a failure has left you with debts you cannot manage, please seek practical help: a financial adviser, a lawyer if necessary, a trusted elder with business experience. If it has left you persistently low, unable to sleep or hopeless, speak to a doctor or counsellor as well as a pastor. These are not signs of weak faith. They are part of rising again.
Olaide told his wife the truth on a Thursday evening, after the children had gone to bed. He told me afterwards that it was the hardest conversation of his life. She was silent for a long time. Then she wept, and then she was angry, and he let her be both. “You did not trust me,” she said. He had no defence. He said he was sorry, and that he would never again hide money from her.
PunchlineIt took months for the trust to begin to return. But she went with him to the cooperative, and together they negotiated a longer repayment schedule.
Then he made another considered decision. He did not restart the farm, not yet. Instead he took a job as a supervisor on a much larger poultry operation in Ogun State, run by a woman who had been in the business for twenty years. “I want to learn how she does it,” he said. “I did a two-week course and called myself a farmer. Let me see what a real farmer knows.” He has been there a year. He is paying off the loan. He talks sometimes about starting again with five hundred birds, a buffer in the bank and a vaccination schedule taped to the wall. Or he may not. He says he will decide with his wife.
The last time we spoke, I asked him whether he still thought he was a failure.
“A plan failed,” he said. “Some of it was my fault, and I have dealt with that. Some of it was not. But I am still here, and God is still directing my steps.” He smiled. “I am just letting Him do the directing this time, instead of announcing it.”
If your plans have failed, let yourself grieve. Then sort the wreckage honestly. Repent of what needs repentance, learn from what was unwise, and release what was never yours to control. Then rise, and make the next decision with care. The Lord who directs your steps has not let go of you.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Is there a failed plan in your life that you have turned into a verdict about yourself? What verdict did you reach, and is it true?
- Looking at that failure, what was beyond your control, what was unwise, and what, if anything, was sin?
- Do you tend more towards false guilt or towards excusing guilt when things go wrong?
- How does David’s response at Ziklag (grief, strength in God, enquiry, action) help you think about your own disappointments?
- What would it mean for you to press towards “the mark” of God’s calling, even if a particular plan has collapsed?
This Week
Choose one plan that has failed in your life, recent or long ago. Take a sheet of paper and draw three columns: “Beyond my control”, “Unwise”, and “Sin”. Fill them in honestly, ideally with a trusted friend or mentor. Pray over the first column and release it to God. Write down one lesson from the second column that you will carry into future decisions. For anything in the third column, confess it to God and, if another person was affected, take one step this week towards putting it right.
A Prayer
Father, You know the plans I made and the ones that have fallen apart. I bring You my disappointment and my grief, and I thank You that I do not have to hide my tears from You. Help me to see clearly what happened. Where I was presumptuous or deceitful, I confess it, and I receive Your forgiveness through Jesus. Where I was unwise, teach me. Where things were beyond my control, help me to release them into Your hands. Thank You that You still direct my steps, even through this. Give me the courage to rise again and the wisdom to make my next decision carefully. Keep my eyes on the prize of Your high calling in Christ Jesus. In His name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.