Disappointment

‘God will not disappoint you’. These words were said in church last week and my initial reaction was the thought ‘but he’s disappointed me’.

This now means I feel the need to breakdown that statement and my reaction.

Firstly I’m not sure it actually says anywhere in the Bible that God won’t disappoint us.

In fact I’m sure there is rather a lot about the way being narrow, with valleys and tough times. To really gain an understanding we need to start by looking at what disappoint means, so from my Collins dictionary we get :

a) a) to fail to meet the expectations, hopes, etc of; let down

b) b) to prevent the fulfilment of (a plan etc); frustrate

This ties in to my entry two weeks ago on expectations.

A blanket statement such as the one I opened with is only asking for trouble – in my opinion, simply because God’s way isn’t our way. Therefore unless we are totally in God’s will when we expect, then there is every chance we will be disappointed more than once. Every time God’s answer is no it’s fairly likely we will experience disappointment because at it’s foundation disappointment is an emotion, it’s how we feel when we don’t get our own way.

I believe it’s far more important to be able to move past disappointment than expect a life with no disappointment. Life happens and for most of us we don’t always get our own way. Not even the disciples and leaders of the early church lived lives with no disappointment.

Rather than think God will never disappoint us we would be better off remembering that He won’t let things come to us that we won’t be able to handle (with His help). The Bible tells us the way is narrow; though they may not be heavy there is a yolk and burden in following God, and even the 23 Psalm says there will be times we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, any one who thinks that means it’s all going to be easy isn’t thinking it through.