My words are prayers,
Even as I complain, my God.
(Everyday Psalms, Psalm 64, page 145)
“I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no satisfaction. ‘Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.
I can’t get no, I can’t get no.” It’s not high poetry, but Mick Jagger connects with a basic frustration of life. Things just don’t turn out the way we want them to. In fact, most things fall far short.
You’ve always been the best athlete through elementary school and into high school, with dreams of the big lights. But no college offers a scholarship and the dream dies.
You’ve spent years and tens of thousands of dollars in education, training to serve God by being a pastor. But the churches you’ve pastored refuse to do what it takes to grow, except to grow tired of you.
You’ve loved your children with everything in you, but they’ve walked away and rarely even acknowledge you anymore.
You don’t get the job you’ve been holding out for. Or you do get it and it turns out to be nothing like what you’d hoped for.
Circumstance disappoint us. People disappoint us. God disappoints us. We disappoint ourselves.
“You are a disappointment.” It just might be the harshest thing one person can say to another. It moves from being disappointed in what someone has done to being disappointed in the person themselves.
In the TV show Ted Lasso, the character Nate does something out of step for himself and immediately regrets it, leaving the room in embarrassment. But he can’t leave himself behind and is confronted with his image in a mirror. In disgust and self-loathing, he spits at himself.
Disappointment is poison. It’s an infection of the soul that kills if not dealt with.
As we pray our disappointments, we get to what’s behind them: We make false attachments and have unrealistic expectations.
When my football team loses a game it “should” have won and I spend the rest of the day in a funky mood out of my disappointment, prayer leads me to the conclusion that I have a false attachment to the team. I should be attached to the people in my life I say I love, not to a group of over-paid men playing a kids’ game with a ball.
Prayer reorders my attachments by reattaching me to God and letting all other attachments be reevaluated in its light.
Then there are unrealistic expectations. We have them of our spouses, our children, our churches, our political leaders, our friends, our Lord. When I was a pastor, even though our church was growing, I had a sense that many were unhappy. So I did an expectations survey to see what the congregation expected of me as their pastor and of other things. No two surveys were the same. Their expectations were all over the board, conflicting with one another. I was in a no-win situation, disappointing people no matter what I did as long as their expectations were aligned and realistic.
So, we bring our attachments and expectations and lay them before God in prayer whenever our disappointments flare up and reveal them to us. As we pray them, we move to reordering our attachments and expectations even if only an inch at a time, dealing with the source of our disappointments and not just the feeling of being let down.
Prayer: As beautiful as it is, this world is a letdown. I know I was made for more and I keep being disappointed by what I end up with. I make plans and they don’t work out the way I want them to, even if I seem to succeed. Help me to attach myself to you and the others I say I love instead of to my plans and the results I seek. Even if I fall short in all else, there is no failing when you are my true goal. In Jesus. Amen.
For further reading: Disappointment With God: Three Questions No One Asks Aloud by Philip Yancey. Zondervan, 1988.