Heaviness of Disappointment

       This has become a very difficult thing for me to process. It has been rather difficult for me to think about sharing this story with others. I would write words down and erase them and write some more words and finally just end up closing my laptop. It just was too difficult for me. Strength, bravery, and courage arise from the heart of vulnerability. It is not comfortable but it is freeing. And it brings peace to the journey ahead. Take a walk with me as I share with you the road of disappointment.

        Have you ever been disappointed before? I’m not just talking about being disappointed in school grades or a waitress bringing you the wrong order. Yet, these are very serious disappointments. No, I am talking about disappointments in life that can seriously wreck our lives. Maybe a person that you really trusted has let you down. These disappointments mean being let down in a job or enduring a break-up and you just do not know how you will recover from either one of these. When this kind of disappointment comes into your life, how do you react? Do you think that everything is just fine and that these things sometimes happen? Maybe, some of us react that way and I commend you for that. Mostly, because I know I could never act in that way. If we are being really honest, we don’t act like that. We get angry. We get frustrated. We ask all of the difficult questions. We wonder what we did wrong or even worse what is wrong with us. Disappointment must be felt if we are going to truly find healing in our lives and move on to what is next. 

     "On disappointment: Don’t immediately brush it off. Feel it first, and then it will leave you quicker. Here’s the thing about broken  glass: it needs to be acknowledged and swept up so you don’t step on it later."

Victoria Erickson

       Disappointment looks differently to each of us. But it is still there. It is still apart of our lives. And it is important that we feel these emotions in order to move on. We must learn to grieve. 

      Jeremiah had to learn to grieve. Jeremiah. Someone that we are not particularly eager to emulate in our lives. But he should be your role model. He is a prophet that we seldom read and when we do we just assume that he was this major complainer. This is why it is so easy for us to call him the “Weeping Prophet." It isn’t like his job was actually difficult. It was that he had a wrong perspective of it all.

     If only that was true. But it just isn’t. 

        Jeremiah gets it. He gets what it means to be feeling miserable and holds nothing back. I just love Jeremiah. He is brave in his honesty. He openly mourns before the Lord and shares everything that he feels in his heart and in regards to his situation. And he gets it because he knows what it means to connect with the Lord. The Lord doesn’t tell him to quit his whining. The Lord doesn’t tell him to suck it up and be a stronger prophet. No, he enters with him in the midst of such suffering. 

       Jeremiah was embodying all of the human emotions. He feels distress, fear of shame, fear of failure, frustration, and anger toward God. Have you ever been disappointed with the Lord? Has He spoke promises to you and you are still waiting on their fulfillment? Or maybe you have just wondered where God was at times? 

       I have. I have wondered where God was at times. Three months ago, I felt the full weight of disappointment. In the month of May, I took a risk in faith and trusted in the Lord’s power to heal through shutting off my insulin pump and placing the area of health into His hands. For the next couple of weeks, it would appear and feel like the Lord radically healed me. Yet, six months later, the healing dissipated from my body and I have returned to a dependent supply of insulin.

        I have wrestled with the Lord in this. I have asked the difficult questions. I have mainly wrestled with wondering how a healing can be taken away. How can one lose a healing? What did I do wrong? More specifically, is there something wrong with me? I mean, I obviously could not handle healing. That has to be why this happened. 

      Honestly, I was believing a lie. I had believed the lie that if I truly believed that God is good, then I wouldn’t be feeling so sad, so disappointed. But that is just not true. The Enemy says: “If you really believe He is good, then you need to stop being sad.” See, Satan wants me to believe this. He wants me to feel this way and distrust the heart of God. But the Lord was tearing down this lie: “I need you to grieve disappointment right now. I give you full permission to be angry with me.” 

       So, I reject this disappointment. I reject this shame. I refuse to sit in this disappointment. The Enemy wants me to believe that he and his curse still has a grip on me. And I reject that! Hope is stirring deep within my broken soul.

       I have walked into the liminal space. This is familiar to writers, and it is also familiar to many Christians. We call it many different things in our Christian culture. It consists of terms such as: "the desert," "the wilderness," or "the valley." But the reality is that referring this season to liminality changes one’s perspective on what exactly this space is meant to be.

       It is primarily a place of transformation and pruning. It is not comfortable, but it is weaning us off the comfortability of convenience or normalcy. Liminality is all about the in-between spaces. It includes those unexciting, less climactic moments in our life. The moments we should actually be thankful for, but unfortunately we only come to those moments waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is really a space of transformation. This is the meat of every great story. It is the in-between moment between the already and not yet, between the problem and the resolution. It is the space between the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, and him becoming Batman. Every great story needs to consist of a protagonist who changes, and that change happens through liminality. This word literally means ‘threshold,’ the door between one season of life and the next, the time between the wound and healing. 

     Jeremiah’s liminal space leads him closer to the Lord. It makes him a stronger prophet. He cries out over and over again. He laments. It is not so easy for him to be obedient as he sits in this space. But, even so, he knows the Lord has not left him yet. The Lord doesn’t tell him to stop whining. He doesn’t tell him to be stronger. He draws near to him. He meets with him in his suffering. The confidence in God is the ground on which complaint is possible.

     I have been in this liminal space, and it has made me stronger. Kari Jobe says, “Miracles don’t always happen in the way we pray for them to. But God is at a work in a different way.” I believe this is true for me right now. If God had never asked, I would have never experienced the Healer. God is at work in a different way in me. This is a season. The truth is we walk through the valley while we sit and linger in other seasons. So, the Lord gives us full permission to grieve and lament because He has the heart of the Father. 

        I don’t know if you know this or not, but God’s heart is so beautiful. He loved His children so much that He chose to become like us in our humanity. He did this to fully understand us in our humanity. He has the full embodiment of human emotion. This means we have full permission to feel. We tend to withhold emotions from God because we don’t think He can handle them. Our perception of God is so flawed. We think about His character in regards to a judge instead of a compassionate Father. We just think He waits on us to screw up. We think we are achieving his approval. We think we are achieving His appreciation in us.

Brennan Manning writes, “[The parent] may disapprove of the child’s behavior, but their love is not contingent on the child’s performance (Abba’s Child).”

           He relates this to the love of the Father.  The Father’s love is not contingent on our behavior or performance. Before we made our mark, found our gifts, knew anything about ourselves, the Father loved us completely. 

     And the Father grieves with us. He grieves throughout all Scripture. The Son of God also grieves. The Son of God also finds space to lament. Think of John 11:35. At the death of Lazarus, we see Jesus grieving, weeping tears. And He promises that He only does what His Father is also doing. When you see Jesus weep, just know He is only doing what the Father is also doing. Jesus is revealing the heart of the Father. 

     Jesus goes to a place of lamenting at the Garden of Gethsemane. He felt full human emotions in this place. He feels the weight of disappointment from His own dear friends. And He falls down on his face before the Father. He knew His mission. Yet, He asks for this cup to be taken away. He begs for another way. His face down, lamenting before the Father gives us full permission to lament as well. It gives us full permission to be honest with the Lord. It is helpful to me to go to the Garden of Gethsemane and see my Savior lift his heart in lament. It helps me to know I am not alone. For the Son of God needed to grieve. 

          I have fallen down on my knees before the Father in that same posture. The process of lamenting is not easy. But, we can go to the Garden and see the Son of God suffer in agony. He lamented and didn’t hide his heart from the Father. I would cry “Do you even hear me crying out to you?” As I asked where He was, God revealed my earthly father to me. He gave me a vivid memory of my relationship with my father. What did you father do for you in this moment? As a child, I walked out of the funeral home, heartbroken with tears falling down my face, and my father came beside me and walked me through that. He held me and consoled me. Did he scold me and say, "Lexie, we are in public. Pull yourself together." No. My father was with me in that moment. He knew I was in pain because he was in pain as well. He knew I was grieving because he was grieving as well. 

        I felt such joy with my heavenly Father in this moment. He was showing me how He was not being silent. He wanted me to see His heart as my Father. He was saying, "I am walking you through this. I see you grieving because I am grieving as well. I see your pain. I am suffering beside you in this." I realized that when a child is grieving, the Father is not going to tell them to stop feeling that way. The Father is quiet, drawing near to hold his child. 

        And this is the Father that wants to meet with us. This is Our Father who wants to know us. We don't need to fear what is in our hearts. For this love takes us in.