Disappointment Can Be a Gift

I get disappointed sometimes. I’m not as in tune with my feelings as some people are, but that’s one I pick up on when it happens. Can you relate? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. posited that man is perpetually “reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.” We innately recognize that the world is not as it ought to be. It’s a universal feeling. Yet at the same time, humans so often can’t agree on how things ought to be which only leads to more disappointment, conflict, even war… 

What do we do? May I suggest that we’re not reaching high enough? Disappointment can be a gift that points us toward something greater. SomeONE greater. We were never meant to find our ultimate satisfaction in people, nature, experiences, or things. In Acts 17 the Apostle Paul addressed the philosophers of Athens, who spent their time in nothing but worshipping idols (think anything people value more than God) and telling or hearing something new, by saying: 

he [God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. (v. 25) 

And later 

they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’
(v. 27-28) 

He was calling them to lift their eyes. To go to God for life and breath and everything and living and moving and having our being… that’s pretty comprehensive! And it’s how life works best. We’re not left to only grasp at transient things with a weak shelf life (in light of eternity) for meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life. God made us in his image, full of dignity and unsurpassed worth, and he offers eternal life in him. He’ll never disappoint. One last passage from Paul. This time he’s writing to the Ephesians:

according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3:16-19) 

– ABOUT THE AUTHOR –