"Nothing prepares you for Pakistan.”

That’s what my friend was told when he landed in Pakistan to live and work. Before arrival he spent six months doing cultural training and learning Urdu. Stepping off the plane he felt ready and keen to get to his new home. However, walking out of the airport terminal in Islamabad he was shocked and overwhelmed by the cacophony of noise, chaotic crowds, and confusing faces of strangely dressed people trying to sell him things. Realising Pakistan was nothing like he expected, he later asked his American friend how he could have been better prepared?

The truth is, you can’t be. Not really.

Whether you’re a backpacker, expat or aid worker, no matter how much training or preparation you do, nothing really prepares us for a radically different country, culture and climate. Drop us into Samoa, Bangkok, or Mexico and we’re assaulted by a kaleidoscope of new sights, sounds, and smells. It’s a lot more than culture shock. It can overwhelm us and threaten our sense of security – causing us to rapidly seek refuge in what’s familiar and safe.

If you’ve read the first few chapters of Encounter, you’ll know we felt the same arriving in Samoa.

We have this experience partly because God has blessed with an imagination that enables us to anticipate a future and plan for it. But imagination also breeds expectation.

Whether we’re seeking adventure, new sights, new culinary delights, or just the experience of a new culture, we build our expectations based on our limited past experience. We easily think Thailand is like our local Thai restaurant.

We’d heard Samoan buses operate without timetables, but otherwise a bus is a bus isn’t it? We had no idea we’d need to learn a complex social etiquette to determine who gets a seat, or who sits on your knee when the bus is crowded. Our imagination can’t foreknow the incredible complexity of the world around us, and the only way to acquire and integrate this knowledge is by lived experience.

So, is preparation a waste of time? Absolutely not! The more prep you can do the better. However, the purpose of planning and prep isn’t to avoid the shock, but to give yourself the best chance of surviving it.

In the military they say “a plan never survives contact with the enemy” – which is why they practice and train so hard to expect the unexpected. They know it’s all going to go to pot, so they go into conflict with a toolbox of skills and equipment that might prove useful, and contingency plans they can pull out if needed.

So, get your travel shots, take advice, and learn as much language and culture as you can, because the best training leverages someone else’s lived experience. It will give you tools and knowledge that will give you the best opportunity to cope when it’s turns out to be totally different to what you expected.

But what’s true about encounter with another country and culture is also true elsewhere in life. Parents know there’s nothing more wonderful and enriching than raising children, but bringing our first baby home was nothing like my wife and I expected.

Don’t be precious about plans when they disintegrate, or build your self-worth and future happiness on the expectation that life will go according to your plans. Unless you somehow know the future, don’t think you can plan your career out thirty years ahead. The world of our imaginations and dreams is a truly wonderful place where anything can happen. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in, and reality can be harsh.

When I led teams to design innovative, world-first products, we’d come up with great ideas in the lab, but the first time we gave it to a customer they’d do something we never expected. Elon Musk knows this and that’s why his companies’ prototype and fail so often. Whether they’re designing rockets or cars, they’re making products to work in the real world, not the imaginary world in their heads.

Adaptability can be the most important skill to learn. So, when you make plans, make room for the unexpected, for serendipity, for God to provide that unlooked for opportunity. Then when your plans go out the window, make new plans.

The world God made for us is a truly amazing place, but it’s also more complicated than the shape of our wildest dreams. As Hamlet says, there really are “more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

So watch, wait and wonder.