It's Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered

by Lysa TerKeurst

God is the author of the Truth that empowers us. Satan is the author of the deception that imprisons us. And once he’s isolated us and imprisoned us, his plan is to destroy us. There is no freedom in sin. There is a quickly fading thrill with sparks and fireworks, but then darkness envelopes, and you realize the party is in a prison cell. Anything that doesn’t line up with Truth is a lie. And where there is a lie, the enemy is at work. The longer he can keep someone deceived, the more their flesh will scream for pleasure, and soon they will become slaves to the most depraved versions of their desires.

These people are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” (2 Peter 2:17–19)

Those are hard verses. A spring without water is a spring that’s dry and not fulfilling its purpose. A person like this has stopped being filled with the living water of God, grown cold and hard, and cannot fulfill the purposes of God.

What was just a small thought becomes part of a full-blown storm inside of them, taking over their decisions and eventually affecting those around them.

There is confusion, deception, justification, and damage that is done when we are not just being deceived by our desires but also leading others astray in the process. Whenever we are living any sort of double life, we are misleading others. We can’t lead others to healthy places when we are making unhealthy choices ourselves.

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:7–8)

First, we must do the honest work of admitting our motives driving the desire. Just because I want something doesn’t mean it’s God’s best for me. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should do it. “‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say—but not everything is beneficial. ‘I have the right to do anything’—but not everything is constructive” (1 Corinthians 10:23).

Taking time to check our motives is crucial. I challenge myself with, “Will this make me more like Christ or less like Him?” Some other questions to ask are, “Will this help me get more healthy spiritually, emotionally, and physically?” and “Would the most spiritually mature person I know think this is a good choice?”

God isn’t shaking His finger at us; He’s planning something better for us. What we are all truly desiring is more of God; His best is the only source of true satisfaction. He is the only answer to our every desire. He holds all the answers to all our disappointments and will direct our desires in His way, in His will, and in His timing. He’s got a good plan for good things. He doesn’t give His gifts wrapped in packages of confusion and anxiety and guilt and shame. James 1:16–17 assures us of this: “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”

We all have something tugging at us. We all do. Being honest about that is the first step away from the enemy and back toward God. The minute we feel immune to the enemy’s tactics is the minute pride, self-reliance, and self-deception rev up and God’s Word gets tuned out. Trust me, the enemy is as interested in tapping into your disappointments as he was with my friend. The enemy doesn’t take vacations, so we shouldn’t take vacations from studying God’s Word either. We wouldn’t want to go even a few hours without water, certainly not days or weeks, and we should view God’s living water for our souls in the same way. Satan isn’t intimidated by how strong we appear. He notices a thirsty soul quite parched. He’s sneaky. He’s crafty. He’s subtle in how he slithers up next to us and flashes just the right thing, at just the right time, in the moments we are unknowingly weak enough to think, Hmmm . . . that looks good. That might really satisfy me.

It was a slow descent down a slippery slope. One justification after another that turned into a web of deceit. When we listen to the enemy’s lies, we are prone to start telling our own lies.

The game was no longer fun. It was a nightmare that stretched on for more than a year.

She couldn’t let him go. But he wouldn’t commit. And even if he would commit, deep down she felt confused and conflicted. She thought things would play out like the very best romantic movie. But you can’t build something true from a pile of lies.

If it feels good, it must be good. I deserve something for me for once. After all, God wants me to be happy.” But Jeremiah 17:9 clearly says our hearts can’t be trusted: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Every single thing our emotions tell us must be held up to the Truth of God’s Word. Otherwise, we will be susceptible to the way our enemy twists our thoughts and feelings and uses them to deceive us.

the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart must be pleasing to the Lord. And this can only happen when I align my words, thoughts, and desires with Scripture. Otherwise, our desire to ease the ache of our disappointments will lead us right into the enemy’s lies and his grip of destruction. We must not forget that our soul hunger can only be satisfied by daily doses of truth, otherwise we will be prone to snack on deception.

No matter how alluring his lies are at first and how much they may seem to be rooted in your self-care, remember that Satan doesn’t want to be your friend. He doesn’t want to help you find happiness. He wants to accuse you. He will use all that temptation and deception against you. When we sin we give the devil a personal script for how to make us feel unqualified and unable to be forgiven.

He wants to consume us. He wants to consume our dust, so nothing good can ever come from it.

Here’s his script: Temptation: Don’t you want to feel good? Try this . . . it’s amazing. Deception: You deserve this. You’re special enough to get away with it. And no one will ever know. It will just be your well-deserved pleasure. Accusation: Look at what you’ve done now. God is ashamed of you. When people find out, they will shame you and rename you as the loser you are. So you better keep it a secret. This isn’t just a choice you made. This is who you really are. You’ll never escape this shame or be healed of this pain. The best you can ever do is numb your pain, and I’ve got a few suggestions for how to do just that.

We are all just a few poor choices away from sinful situations we never thought we’d be in. I think my response to my friend after we studied these verses together surprised her. I looked up with tears in my eyes and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you for letting me in. Thank you for giving me reason to study all of this so intentionally. Thank you for being brave enough to let me see the danger of disappointments giving way to dangerous desires. Thank you for letting me see what the enemy never wants any of us to see: the consequences of those desires dragging us away into deadly choices. Your story will not be wasted. God is already using for good what the enemy meant for evil.” Redemption is here. Dust is being made new both for me and for you. The enemy may be vicious, but he is not victorious.

If my Bible is collecting dust and my conscience is being hushed, then my heart is in danger of being crushed. REMEMBER: • Dangerous desires birthed inside our unsettled disappointments are nothing but a setup for a takedown. • The enemy wants to tempt, deceive, and accuse you. • Temptation only works if our enemy keeps the consequences hidden from us. • Truth sheds light on darkness and helps us see what a horrible trap Satan is luring us into. • Your soul is made by God to respond to Truth. • God is the author of the Truth that empowers us. Satan is the author of the deception that imprisons us. • The enemy’s deception is hand-designed to draw your attention, affection, and worship away from God. • If we are going to be true to ourselves, we’d better make sure we are being true to our most surrendered, healed, and healthy selves. • God isn’t expecting perfection. He just wants us to be perfectly surrendered to His way and His Word. • If I forget my soul hunger can only be satisfied by daily doses of truth, I’m prone to snack on deception. • Your story will not be wasted. RECEIVE: Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all y...

One of the phrases Webster uses to define awkward is “lacking in assurance.” Yup. Nailed it. I want to be deeply assured that my life is lining up the way I thought it would. In reality, though, my life is highly unpredictable. And when it goes off plan, as it does so often, I get flustered and unable to immediately interact with other humans in any way other than awkward. It’s not that I want to be awkward; it’s just that I really, really like a calm sense of normalcy. I like a plan. I like things to go as planned. I like all involved to follow along with the plan. I want my people to stay within the boundary lines of safety and predictability. I don’t want to experience any unexpected deviations from the plan at all, ever.

Whatever your situation is, you probably feel like you can’t change it, but you still have to live through the realities of what’s happening right now. Sometimes you just have to walk in your “I don’t know.” The Lord makes it clear in His Word

Fear seems to be a close cousin of disappointment. They are related, because we feel them so deeply, they paralyze us so easily, and the pat answers so many Christians try to place on them trip us up. We are desperate to make things easier than they really are.

But what if life settling down and all your disappointments going away would be the worst thing that could happen to you? What if your “I don’t know” is helping you, not hurting you? What if your “I don’t know” is helping you let go of things you aren’t supposed to know, because that knowledge would be too heavy a burden for today? But the One you do know, the Lord, is so perfectly capable to bear it all.

We think we want comfort in the I-don’t-know times of life. But comfort isn’t a solution to seek; rather, it’s a by-product we’ll reap when we stay close to the Lord.

What if the comfort and certainties we crave today are a deadly recipe for complacency that will draw our hearts further and further away from God? There are many examples of this in the Bible, but let’s look at one tucked into Jeremiah:

Settling into complacency might seem to be comfortable for today, but in the long run we, like the Moabites, may suffer more if we go untouched by God for too long. Make no mistake: being lulled into a false sense of security is worse than going through the process of suffering.

Just as we have to get off the couch and pour ourselves into working out if we want to gain physical strength, we have to be poured into circumstances that will result in our being transformed if we want to gain spiritual strength. In the middle of our disappointments and hard times, we must seek to be transformed into thinking biblically, processing with truth instinctively, and trusting God implicitly.

We must get rid of the dregs—weakness, fear, complacency, and the hopeless resignation that all of life is unfair and God is unjust. To sit in those dregs will cause us to absorb more and more of the world’s way of thinking. To think like the world leads to death—death of hope, death of peace, death of joy. But to think like Christ is to have fresh life breathed inside of us and His peace radiating from us.

We must not go too long untouched by God. If we want to know God’s will, God’s perspective, God’s good that He has in store for us, then we must not be conformed to the world’s way of processing life but be transformed by God’s Word and God’s way: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2).

When we ask for God’s strength, peace, courage, and the ability to overcome and to right the wrongs, God will pour us into circumstances He knows will infuse us with the very things we’ve asked Him to give us. It’s good for us to desire these maturing qualities. And it’s good for God to give them to us. The process of acquiring these good qualities doesn’t usually feel good at the time, but it will be good in time.

Every time we face anything that causes us to cry out to God, let’s declare that this hard time will be a holy time, a close-to-God time. And if the people you love are going through a hard time, I want you to declare this same thing for them. This hard time will be a holy time! A close-to-God time! These disappointments we all go through are actually divine appointments to see God do a new thing. Pouring us out of the old wine jars that have kept us in stale thinking and into the new jars of minds transformed by Christ’s perspective. Isaiah 43:18–19 reminds us, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

When we are poured out and purified, other situations that arise won’t bother us the way they used to. Disappointments won’t sting the way they used to. Hurts won’t dig in so deeply the way they used to. We won’t get discouraged and derailed the way we used to.

We won’t get nearly as caught off guard when we trust that God is on guard looking to strengthen us for what He sees coming. “God will strengthen you with his own great power so that you will not give up when troubles come, but you will be patient” (Colossians 1:11 NCV).

The enemy tries to gain a foothold over: Affection—my heart, what I love Adoration—my mouth, what I worship Attention—my mind, what I focus on Attraction—my eyes, what I desire Ambition—my calling, what I spend my time seeking Action—my choices, how I stand firm

Comfort isn’t a solution to seek; rather it’s a by-product we’ll reap when we stay close to the Lord. REMEMBER: • Being lulled into a false sense of security is worse than going through the process of suffering. • To be like Jesus, we must become more and more saturated with Him and less and less saturated with our human ways of processing circumstances. • These disappointments we all go through are actually divine appointments to see God do a new thing. • If we have a misunderstanding of God, we will most certainly have a wrong understanding of our circumstances. • When we express God’s truth, we depress the enemy’s lies. • Using God’s truth as your fighting words will not change what you see, but it absolutely will change how you see. RECEIVE: God will strengthen you with his own great power so that you will not give up when troubles come, but you will be patient. (Colossians 1:11 NCV) Also read: Numbers 23:19 Psalm 19:14; 91:14–15; 112:7; 138:1–3, 7; 145:18 Proverbs 4:25–27; 5:1–2 Isaiah 16:6–7, 10; 26:3; 43:1–5, 18–19 Jeremiah 24:7; 48:11 Lamentations 3:21–23 Matthew 6:33–34 John 16:12–15, 33 Romans 8:5–6; 12:2 Ephesians 2:10 Philippians 3:15–21; 4:1, 6–8 2 Thessalonians 2:15–17 Hebrews 3:1; 12:1–2 James 5:13 1 Peter 4:12–13; 5:8 1 John 2:16 REFLECT: • What if your “I don’t know” is helping you, not hurting you? Even now, what positives can you see coming from your season of disappointment? • What ...

This life between two gardens is confusing and complicated. Dust is messy. We don’t even like to touch dust, especially if it’s made up of the shattered pieces of our own hearts. Thankfully, we don’t have to. We can hand it over to God—the One who forms our dust into something we want but never could have made for ourselves.