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Disappointment occurs when the actual experience of something falls far short of what we anticipate.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is required. The stars neither require it nor demand it. ANNIE DILLARD
A young woman wrote, with some embarrassment, about her ongoing depression. She has no reason to be depressed, she said. She is healthy, earns a good salary, and has a stable family background. Yet most days when she wakes up she cannot think of a single reason to go on living. She no longer cares about life or God, and when she prays, she wonders if anyone is really listening.
It is intriguing that she is still praying, though.
Yet churches never hear testimonies from the grievers. What would the spouses of the dead missionaries say? Would they talk about a “loving Father”?
True atheists do not, I presume, feel disappointed in God. They expect nothing and receive nothing. But those who commit their lives to God, no matter what, instinctively expect something in return. Are those expectations wrong?
Would a burst of miracles nourish faith? Not the kind of faith God seems interested in, evidently. The Israelites give ample proof that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.
The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust his heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. HERMAN MELVILLE
Despite the awesome emptiness of our universe, despite the pain that haunts it, something lingers, like a scent of old perfume, from that moment of beginnings in Genesis 1. I too have sensed it. The first time I rounded a bend and saw Yosemite Valley spread out before me, its angel-hair waterfalls spilling over the snow-glazed granite. On a small peninsula of Ontario where five million migrating monarch butterflies stop to rest, their papery wings adorning every tree with shimmering, translucent orange. In the children’s zoo in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where every beast born — gorilla,
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When God created, he invented the media as he went, calling into being what had existed only in his imagination, and along with every free choice came a limitation. He chose a world of time and space, a “medium” with peculiar restrictions: first A happens, then B happens, and then C. God, who sees future, past, and present all at once, selected sequential time as an artist selects a canvas and palette, and his choice imposed limits we have lived with ever since.
God wanted faith, the Bible says, and that is the lesson Abraham finally learned. He learned to believe when there was no reason left to believe.
Somehow, that “faith” was what God valued, and it soon became clear that faith was the best way for humans to express a love for God.
Through all his trials, Joseph learned to trust: not that God would prevent hardship, but that he would redeem even the hardship. Choking back tears, Joseph tried to explain his faith to his murderous brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good. . . .”
Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.
Success may have eliminated any crises of disappointment with God, but it also seemed to eliminate Solomon’s desire for God at all. The more he enjoyed the world’s good gifts, the less he thought about the Giver.
For the prophets, human history is not an end in itself but a transition time, a parenthesis between Eden and the new heaven and new earth still to be formed by God. Even when everything seems out of control, God is firmly in control, and someday will assert himself.*
The miracles did just what Jesus had predicted. To those who chose to believe him, they gave even more reason to believe. But for those determined to deny him, the miracles made little difference. Some things just have to be believed to be seen.
In fact, God’s reliance on the church almost guarantees that disappointment with God will be permanent and epidemic. In the old days, if the Hebrews wanted to know God’s will about a military maneuver, or what kind of wood to use in the sanctuary, the high priests had ways of discerning the answer. But 1,275 denominations in the U.S. alone attest to the difficulty of the church agreeing on God’s will about anything nowadays. The confused voice of the modern church is part of the cost, the disadvantage to living today rather than with the Hebrews in the desert or among the disciples who
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God’s plan includes risk on both sides. For us, it means risking our independence by committing to follow an invisible God who requires of us faith and obedience. For God, it means risking that we, like the Israelites, may never grow up; it means risking that we may never love him. Evidently, he thought it a gamble worth taking.
God is not on trial in this book. Job is on trial. The point of the book is not suffering: Where is God when it hurts? The prologue dealt with that issue. The point is faith: Where is Job when it hurts? How is he responding? To understand the Book of Job, I must begin there.
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now T. S. ELIOT
After the fall from Paradise, history entered a new phase. Creation God had done by himself, starting with nothing and ending up with the universe in all its splendor. The new work is Re-creation, and for this God employs the very human beings who had originally spoiled his work. Creation progressed through stages: first stars, then the sky and sea, and on through plants and animals, and finally man and woman. Re-creation reverses the sequence, starting with man and woman and culminating in the restoration of all the rest. In many ways the act of Re-creation is “harder” than creation, for it
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In our century, it takes faith to believe that a human being amounts to more than a combination of DNA programming, instincts of the gene pool, cultural conditioning, and the impersonal forces of history. Yet even in this behaviorist century, we want to believe differently. We want to believe that the thousand hard and easy choices we make each day somehow count. And the Book of Job insists that they do; one person’s faith can make a difference. There is a role for human beings, after all, and by fulfilling that role Job set a pattern for anyone who ever faces doubt or hardship.
But the more important battle, as shown in Job, takes place inside us. Will we trust God? Job teaches that at the moment when faith is hardest and least likely, then faith is most needed. His struggle presents a glimpse of what the Bible elsewhere spells out in detail: the remarkable truth that our choices matter, not just to us and our own destiny but, amazingly, to God himself and the universe he rules.
I described my book on disappointment with God. “Could you tell me about your own disappointment?” I asked. “What have you learned that might help someone else going through a difficult time?” Douglas was silent for what seemed like a long time. He stroked his peppery gray beard and gazed off beyond my right shoulder. I fleetingly wondered if he was having a mental “gap.” Finally he said, “To tell you the truth, Philip, I didn’t feel any disappointment with God.” I was startled. Douglas, searingly honest, had always rejected easy formulas like the “Turn your scars into stars!” testimonials of
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No one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment — God himself was not exempt. Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to the other side. Just as Good Friday demolished the instinctive belief that this life is supposed to be fair, Easter Sunday followed with its startling clue to the riddle of the universe. Out of the darkness, a bright light shone.
To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness — especially in the wilderness — you shall love him. FREDERICK BUECHNER
We remain ignorant of many details, not because God enjoys keeping us in the dark, but because we have not the faculties to absorb so much light. At a single glance God knows what the world is about and how history will end. But we time-bound creatures have only the most primitive manner of understanding: we can let time pass. Not until history has run its course will we understand how “all things work together for good.” Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.
Kierkegaard said that Christians reminded him of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through. I confess to such schoolboy sentiments, and I doubt that I am alone. We yearn for shortcuts. But shortcuts usually lead away from growth, not toward it. Apply the principle directly to Job: what was the final result of the testing he went through? As Rabbi Abraham Heschel observed, “Faith like Job’s cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken.”
We can never fully plumb the mystery of what took place on the cross, but it does offer the consolation that God is unwilling to put his creatures through any test that he himself has not endured.
When New Testament writers speak of hard times, they express none of the indignation that characterized Job, the prophets, and many of the psalmists. They offer no real explanation for suffering, but keep pointing to two events — the death and resurrection of Jesus — as if they form some kind of pictographic answer. The apostles’ faith, as they freely confessed, rested entirely on what happened on Easter Sunday, when God transformed the greatest tragedy in all history, the execution of his Son, into a day we now celebrate as Good Friday. Those disciples, who gazed at the cross from the
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The God revealed in the Bible does not seem to share our desire. Whereas we cleave natural from supernatural, and seen from unseen, God seeks to bring the two together. His goal, one might say, is to rescue the “lower” world, to restore the natural realm of fallen creation to its original state, where spirit and matter dwelt together in harmony.
We speak to God as we would speak to another person; could anything be more commonplace, more “natural”? Praying, proclaiming the gospel, meditating, fasting, offering a cup of cold water, visiting prisoners, observing the sacraments — these everyday acts, we are told, carry the “higher” meaning. They somehow express the unseen world.
Human longing for the actual presence of God may crop up almost anywhere. But we dare not make sweeping claims about the promise of God’s intimate presence unless we take into account those times when God seems absent.
By no means can we infer that our own trials are, like Job’s, specially arranged by God to settle some decisive issue in the universe. But we can safely assume that our limited range of vision will in similar fashion distort reality. Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else. From Job, we can learn that much more is going on out there than we may suspect. Job felt the weight of God’s absence; but a look behind the curtain reveals that in one sense God had never been more present. In the natural world, human beings only receive about
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the big picture, with the whole universe as a backdrop, includes much activity that we never see. When we stubbornly cling to God in a time of hardship, or when we simply pray, more — much more — may be involved than we ever dream. It requires faith to believe that, and faith to trust that we are never abandoned, no matter how distant God seems.
I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes — I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me! JOB 19:25 – 27
The Bible never belittles human disappointment (remember the proportion in Job — one chapter of restoration follows forty-one chapters of anguish), but it does add one key word: temporary. What we feel now, we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, an aching, a hunger for something better. And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness — for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.
It is a hard thing to live, uncertain of anything. And yet, sobs can still be heard, muffled cries of loss, such as those expressed in literature and film and almost all modern art. The alternative to disappointment with God seems to be disappointment without God.
