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Humans are very attached to outcomes. We say we trust God but behind the scenes we work our fingers to the bone and our emotions into a tangled fray trying to control our outcomes. We praise God when our normal looks like what we thought it would. We question God when it doesn’t. And walk away from Him when we have a sinking suspicion that God is the one who set fire to the hope that was holding us together.
This is how the formula should calculate: hard time plus healing time plus staying faithful to God should equal the exact good outcome we were counting on.
Though we can’t predict or control or demand the outcome of our circumstances, we can know with great certainty we will be okay. Better than okay. Better than normal. We will be victorious because Jesus is victorious (1 Corinthians 15:57). And victorious people were never meant to settle for normal.
Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.
disappointment can be a gift from God
But disappointment isn’t proof that God is withholding good things from us. Sometimes it’s His way of leading us Home.
In the quiet, unexpressed, unwrestled-through disappointments, Satan is handcrafting his most damning weapons against us and those we love. It’s his subtle seduction to get us alone with our thoughts so he can slip in whispers that will develop our disappointments into destructive choices.
If the enemy can isolate us, he can influence us.
we will never appreciate or even desire the hope of our True Love if lesser loves don’t disappoint.
To wrestle well means acknowledging my feelings but moving forward, letting my faith lead the way.
Dust is often what must be present for the new to begin.
When His timing seems questionable, His lack of intervention seems hurtful, and His promises seem doubtful, I get afraid. I get confused. And left alone with those feelings, I can’t help but feel disappointed that God isn’t doing what I assume a good God should do.
She got alone with her own thoughts and assumptions. And it led her to doubt God.
even when we follow in Eve’s footsteps, when we try to take control and make assumptions and misunderstand God on every level, He still has a plan. A good plan. A plan to make something from dust.
If I want His promises, I have to trust His process. I have to trust that first comes the dust, and then comes the making of something even better with us. God isn’t ever going to forsake you, but He will go to great lengths to remake you. What if disappointment is really the exact appointment your soul needs to radically encounter God?
Feeling the pain is the first step toward healing the pain. The longer we avoid the feeling, the more we delay our healing. We can numb it, ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, but all those options lead to an eventual breakdown, not a breakthrough.
The longer we avoid the feeling, the more we delay our healing.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”1
Our pain and suffering isn’t to hurt us. It’s to save us. To save us from a life where we are self-reliant, self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and set up for the greatest pain of all . . . separation from God.
God loves me too much to answer my prayers at any other time than the right time and in any other way than the right way.
You’re learning disappointments aren’t a reason to run away. They are the reason to turn a different way.
He wants us to be so consumed with our unmet expectations that our hearts just get sicker and sicker. He wants our inner selves to get more and more disillusioned with our circumstances, other people, and God. He wants our pain to get more and more intense to the point we lose sight of Jesus completely.
Some things won’t be fixed on this side of eternity; they just have to be walked through.
But when my brain begs me to doubt God—as it most certainly does—I find relief for my unbelief by laying down my human assessments and assumptions. I turn from the tree of knowledge and fix my gaze on the tree of life. I let my soul be cradled by God’s divine assurance. His Son. Who completely understands. And who will walk me through every step of this if I keep my focus on Him.
I declare I don’t have to understand. I just have to trust.
The more I focus on wanting others to change, the more frustrated I will become.
this spirit of fear is not from God
The enemy wants us paralyzed and compromised by the whispers and doubts and what-ifs and opinions and accusations and misunderstandings and all the other hissing handcuffs crafted by fear.
We must set our minds and our hearts on things above by choosing to remember God’s words, repeat God’s words, and believe God’s words about us.
Remember, while God converts with truth, the enemy perverts the truth.
God wants us transformed, but Satan wants us paralyzed.
This is when we settle for the ease of Facebook instead of the more challenging work of digging into God’s book of transformation.
Laziness—choose God over Netflix & Social Media
This is when we coast in our relationships rather than investing in true intimacy.
I expect a perfection in me and a perfection in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can’t I be?
