Gleaning Wisdom from and before Failure

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the automobile industry was taking off.  However, there was one potential hiccup and major hurdle to the industry's growth: rubber.  At that time, synthetic rubbers were still in their infancy and would not be able to fill the demands.  In reaction to the growing need, in 1928, Henry Ford went to Brazil and purchased over 6,200 square miles of Amazon river, beachfront property.  Fordlandia was formed.

Ford sent some of his top engineers and managers who had streamlined his revolutionary mass-production Ford facilities.  The men went down to Fordlandia and, having hired local farmers to live and work in the city, planted hundreds of perfectly symmetrical rows of rubber trees along the banks of Rio Tapajos.

However, the managers and engineers that Ford sent down to Brazil had little to no knowledge of tropical agriculture.  And, not knowing anything about growing rubber trees or tropical farming at all, Fordlandia was a continual and repeated failure.  In 1945, when Ford's grandson took the company over, Fordlandia had incurred a slew of violent local uprisings, had been unsuccessfully relocated further down the Amazon, and was finally sold for a $20 million loss.

The point is that, while Henry Ford saw a need and formed a solution to solve it, because he lacked the information and expertise to accomplish his goals it was an utter failure.  Despite the fact that Ford dumped valuable resources of money and manpower, it was all for naught.  The project failed definitively for a whole litany of reasons, but the chief among them was Ford's own pride.  Henry believed that the skills and tactics that had made him an automobile baron would be equally useful in farming rubber trees.  He was wrong.

Often times we, like Henry Ford, will be faced with issues that we, like Ford, will choose to take on by our own wit or grit.  As Solomon writes, "Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall (Pro. 16:18)."  We need to always remember that while we may have our own plans and our own ways to deal with the scenarios that we are faced with, it is in the Lord that we are established (Pro. 16:9).

Consider the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21), who because the harvest had been so fruitfully plentiful, he tore down his barn to big a larger one to store all of his surplus. Yet before he can lay the first brick, the Lord calls him out, demanding his life that very night.  The primary point of the parable is that the man who stores up riches for himself has no riches in heaven.  However, a secondary and equally important point is that we cannot know when or what God has for us if we are continually making plans apart from His guidance and separated from His presence.

James, in his epistle, picks up on this theme when he says that we do not know what tomorrow may bring for we are but mists that are here today but vanish tomorrow.  Therefore, we should say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that (James 4:13-15)."  This hits a nerve at the heart of our culture that so heralds individualism, self-expression, and personal power.  But apart from the Lord blessing are very step and sustaining us from breath to breath, there is not a single thing that we are capable of doing.  

Therefore, we should seek His will not only to bless our plans, but also to help us determine them as well, remembering that God desires to guide our steps in order that we would walk in accordance with His will (Psa. 37:23-24; Pro. 20:24; Jer. 10:23).  So that we would not walk in the footsteps of Fordlandia, we should always strive to come to God in humility so that He would guide and equip us for every work that He has already prepared for us to do.  Praise be to God who directs and blesses!