Do you ever find that you are living with constant and regular disappointment? Maybe you come to the place where you finally cross a significant bridge. You graduate from high school or college. You get the job that you have worked so hard for. You get married. You have children. You retire. You cross one of these significant bridges and you find that the other side is pretty disappointing.
I find that I often experience disappointment. In some way, my expectations were not met. That disappointment may be in other people or just the circumstances in which I find myself. Too often, the disappointment is in myself.
At times, I think that my expectations are unreal (like the time I thought that I had a real deal off EBay, drove to Dallas to look at it only to find out that it wasn’t what they advertised. At that price, maybe I should have suspected something). At other times, my expectations may have been very reasonable. However, the situation ended up to be disappointing.
I admit that this is something that I try to pay attention to. I have seen too many people experience disappointments and they became sour and cynical about life. I now realize that when people come through in some way that it is a moment of grace. I just need to be thankful that they came through instead of demanding that others live up to what I think they ought to live up to. (As if I lived up to my own expectations!)
Meanwhile, I have found that my expectations of God are often embarassingly low. In fact, it is pretty easy to never be disapppointed in God because we never really expected him to be active anyway.
Maybe–just maybe we are always going to live with disappointment on this earth. Life at times may be very hard and tremendously stressful. Meanwhile, backstage, God continues to work.