What To Do With Disappointment

I have prayed for many people and watched Jesus supernaturally heal them instantly and powerfully. I have prayed for my son to be healed of his skin rash caused by a strep bacteria countless times, and again tonight, I sat by his crib, rubbing his head with cold water until his crying subsided and he was able to sleep again.

While suffering intensely from Lyme Disease, thousands of people prayed for my healing, and while I believe prayer, grace and David kept me barely alive, it was three years before Jesus miraculously healed me. If pain could be measured in distance, we would have circumnavigated the globe many times before that day of healing came.

Sitting in bed reading and praying together, my beloved said; “you know, it’s like we died, and now we’re trying to figure out how to live again. Feeling called, and set apart, yet only just realizing the weight of disappointed dreams and unfathomable pain that still lies heavy across our shoulders, starkly juxtaposed against the thankfulness of a new season upon us.

Disappointment, I believe, is one of the enemy’s favourite tools to pick away at our souls. It can carve a chasm in the bedrock of our faith. But it is also in the mysteries of life that God can become the most real.

What a risk the Father takes to allow His beloved children to walk through life’s fire, knowing the posture we assume determines if we are singed, burned, or beautifully refined.

And so, I open my face to the Son, and invite His light to flood my soul. I want to be openhearted in the questions I ask. I choose to lean up on His chest and look into His eyes, and ask again; “how shall I walk forward now?”
Only to hear Him say again; “Take my hand, my love, and we’ll go together.”

There is the tension that resonates in my spirit of being a friend of God to whom He promised to reveal everything the Father tells Him through the Holy Spirit, yet resting in the knowledge that His thoughts are so much higher than mine, and His ways far beyond my understanding.

Maturity comes when we are given freedom to fail, to learn, to fall, to triumph, and discover God’s dreams are bigger than mine. To realize suffering can be building blocks to fulfilled promises, but the foundation and finisher must be Christ. Always Christ, for the sand of self making has never proved a builder’s friend.

And so I sit with the promises yet unfulfilled in one hand and the disappointments of the past in the other, knowing I can only take one with me into the future.

I choose the promises, closing my hands tightly against the thief who would snatch them from my heart. I release the disappointments, the costly choices already paid, and with that now empty hand, reach up to my Abba who’s hand is outstretched toward mine.

“Ok, lets go together.”