When God disappoints, I usually process it like my own failures too, “God, you coulda fixed that, you shoulda worked that out, I know you woulda, but for some reason You didn’t.”

I know Gods plans are better than my own. It’s just a difficult process sometimes for me to stop and change directions. Especially when I thought I saw a way for God to work something out, but He doesn’t. I had to tell someone yesterday, “Give me some time to just cry about this please. I thought that God was going to bring something good from this situation. But things have fallen through, and seem more messed up now than they ever did before. And unfortunately, due to my theology, I don’t have the option of believing that God allows anything to happen without reason. I know that this is the way it must be. And for now, I just need to cry for the dreams I’ve lost, and for the people I had better expectations for.”

Life is hard, but I’ve noticed that even in really big hurts and disappointments, God doesnt allow anything to be wasted. Maybe I learned yesterday that God doesn’t always redeem situations like I know He COULD.. But I also am reinforcing the idea in my mind, that God can still use every drop of my suffering to open my awareness to others who’s suffering I SHOULD notice… And use the things I feel, to help me empathize with people who God WOULD comfort, if he had arms & ears & some time on his hands…

So, these are just some thoughts on the subject, from a freshly disappointed person…
God allows suffering… But God never allows a drop of human suffering to be wasted.

We are all trying to help a hurting world. But unless we know what it means to hurt, to bring the whole tangled mess to God and to not be ashamed of our pain, then we will never be able to truly comfort others in their pain, without passing judgement. I have a clearer compassion for people now, and I have no bitterness over being broken down. I find it encouraging to remember that a house built upon sand will fall, and when it does, God gets right to work building a stronger foundation. We can all appreciate a solid spiritual foundation, but sometimes that doesn’t happen on the first try, so again we gather supplies and we rebuild.

The themes in that verse really helped me in dealing with the disappointment I experienced after leaving my church. I left because I got to a place in my thinking where the message I was hearing at church did not line up with the things I was experiencing in my spirit. I guess I realized that I needed a sanctuary in which I could continue the process of working out my faith, with fear & trembling.. (And I had come to notice that it seemed like a majority of people at my church were more interested in, shall we say, ‘the process of assembling the heart-shaped boxes which hold the sugar cookies and warm milk we served to each of our first-time guests’….There were more than enough people working on that project, and I wanted real spiritual food, so I thought I would step out in faith and allow my curiosity to lead me to a place where I could find the answers to my more difficult questions.) So, I ended my relationship and stopped going to that church. It had simply become unbearable for me to try and merge the easy bible verse fixes I was being taught, with the incredibly real and in-my-face problems I was experiencing in my life. I needed a God that was real and powerful, not cliché and marketable. When I left, the lifestyle change alone was horrible. Then there was the feeling that I was suddenly insignificant to all of the people whom I thought I had built lifelong friendships with. But I think the hardest part was sensing that God had distanced Himself from me due to my human choice to no longer participate in something which my human heart & human mind were so opposed to. And that was the most disappointing thing.. I felt, “God, God, why have you forsaken me? Yesterday I was part of Your ‘A-Team’ and today I am a hungry dog in the street, I thought You and Me were ‘good’, ya know? I thought that following my discernment was supposed to make me feel better, not worse…” Wow, disappointed by my God, my church, my friends, self, and my overall pitiful life all at the same time.

Fast forward through a couple years of emotional and mental suffering as I worked on wading through the truth, lies, scriptures, teachings, and culture I had programmed into my brain as Law, and I heard the same thing as Andre Green mentioned hearing, “Your struggles are not for you, they are for someone else.” And in the midst of my pain, that message lit a spark in my mind. It must have come at a point in my life when I was wrestling with the options of live/die, believe/give up, because the Word’s message was more promising than any other option I had been mulling over. So I took it to heart, and I made it a sort of mission to find the center of my darkness, and to be fully, and fearfully present within my storm. And it hurt every day. A lot. And there was still no recognizable sense of God’s protection. There was no “sense” of God’s presence at all, because my whole paradigm of what that meant had been shifted.

And what I truly learned through the years of exhaustive searching that followed, was that there is no magic button, or pill, or prayer that can heal my wounds, and reconcile me to peace with Gods plan for my life. Until God builds within me the new vision, there is only the loss of the old vision, and there is only time.. And either I will sit in the pain of mourning my loss, suffering until God says it’s over.. or I will sit in the pain and suffering, absorbing & learning everything I can about the experience of loss, until God says it’s over.

So that’s what I did… since I could see no hope of an early rescue, I had to come to terms with my pain possibly being a tool for something useful in the future. “You can take this cup from me at any time, but yet I want Your plan for my life more than my own.” I made it my mantra, “If this is what You have for me, then I will share in the suffering of the cross. I will dwell richly in the deepness of this darkness. And if my God is real, that is where He shall find me.” I feel that He called me out to the wilderness, to experience the humanness of my state, to learn to wait on His timing, and in the end to discover that He had been there in the breeze whispering, watching like the stars, and healing my heart all along. Now, that’s a poetic description of an awfully painful experience, but now when disappointments come, I give them time to sink in and saturate me with their importance before I react with resistance. (If you read that through to the end, then thank you) -Dani