The Dangers of Disappointment
What do you do when your pain feels more overwhelming than your faith? What do you do when what you prayed for doesn’t just go unanswered but the unthinkable happens? What happens when you see others receive God’s breakthrough and you are left with disappointment?
In our disappointments lie the choice to either fall away or continue to follow Jesus when we are met with great letdowns. I have heard these phrases over the years: “If God was good, then…” or “If God was real, then…” We have attached His goodness and, even worse, His existence to our senses of fulfillment. This means that our disappointments become indicators that He must not be real. We have sometimes linked our happiness and everything working out for us to God’s nature. Conversely, we have attributed our pain to His actions. We have even associated our struggles with fellow believers as being the Father’s fault.
Disappointment is by far an underestimated tool in the devil’s hand. He uses it as a blinding light to point us away from God. Disappointment, meant to lead us into conversations with God, is a wedge that works its way into the middle of our relationship with God. In our disappointments, we often turn to friends, podcasts, or therapists to try to make sense of things that only God can bring peace to.
Situations like deaths and sicknesses become our ammunition either to fall away from or to follow more fervently after Jesus. These events, if not seen through the lens of faith and endurance, will create a view of God as destructive as leaving the faith. Your faith is a home in which you will rest securely knowing your redemption, but its foundation is your views and beliefs. This is why we are to worship the God who made us in His image, not the God we made in ours.
“Fall or follow” is a phrase that came up in a discussion I had about handling disappointments as a Christian. I have witnessed many believers whose faith was shipwrecked because they didn’t know how to process disappointment. The Bible says that nothing can separate us from the love of God, but it never says we can’t willfully walk away from Him (Rom. 8:38–39). I believe more people walk away because of disappointment than we realize. If anybody knew of mistreatment from religious leaders, it was our Savior, Jesus. Sadly, many have chosen not to follow Him anymore because of their brokenness and the brokenness of others. We are now at a pivotal time when we will either fall or follow.
Our default reactions when we face disappointments or letdowns—or when we think we heard God but our experiences don’t align with what we heard—are often to ignore what happened or to throw a lot of Christian jargon at the situation instead of facing the realities of what we went through.
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