Day 4096 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Lamentations 3:18 NIV

What is disappointment?

Is it a simple disagreement with the general direction one’s life is going at any given moment? Is it a life in which we’ve given way to doing things that we didn’t want to do thinking along the way that we had? Is it a time spent looking back on all you may have had the hope to do, the chance to be, a collection instead of things that you never did and thus never were? Is it just a word that we’ve invented to give us some way to define a life upended, a journey daunted, a soul itself endlessly haunted by the many hopes that passed us by?

Is it a dream that wakes us up at night, a story told to a slumbering soul under a starlit night of that way of life that life could have gone, perhaps should have gone had we not gone and done all we did that left that life in those dreams but for dead?

Is it death, the very end of a life in which we always thought that our every hope might we find, or is maybe death the end of disappointment?

Reality is that disappointment is something that all of us have felt and that in far more ways than we’d ever care to count. In fact, I’ve found that disappointment is an appointment so crushing and confrontational that we find it almost entirely not worth remembering at all. After all, why hold tight any memories of a life that didn’t go right, didn’t feel right, didn’t seem right, just wasn’t right? Why allow room inside our minds to those things in life that bring us down and hold us there hostage, prisoners of past regrets, present failures, coming confusions?

For rather than dealing with any more disappointment than we’ve already dealt with along the way to whatever, wherever, whoever is it that this here day finds us to be, no, we find no reason to ever welcome such a disgruntled companion as all disappointment is.

And it is a most disagreeable cohort to be sure!

Because, well, it sure doesn’t ever manage to line up with the line we’d long hoped our life would walk. Doesn’t match to all the ideas we’d had and the dreams from which they came or which came from them. Doesn’t seem at all interested in taking our hopes to heart or even trying to start acting otherwise. In fact, disappointment is itself an otherwise. It’s an outcome other than that for which we’d hoped. It’s an experience contrary to what we’d prayed to experience. It’s life that’s either unfolded or is presently unfolding in what are ways that continue to ruin days and rip hearts from chests as it looks upon the sum of our hopes and takes them for jokes that it doesn’t think are worth the effort needed to make them come true.

And yet disappointment is as true a feeling as any other it seems.

And that’s because it’s something we’ve again all felt more times than we might in the moment remember. Because, again, we probably just don’t want to as rather we seem to remain a most stubborn people who continue to insist upon a life that consists of at least something we’ve dreamed for, prayed for, worked for, waited for. Indeed, to us it just seems as if all of this should have at least some hint of something for which we’d hoped.

After all, what use is our having been given the ability to hope if never can we know the fulfillment thereof?

Doesn’t seem or sound anything like any love from above!

And God’s supposed to be good, loving, kind and caring. How can we make that argument in a world so filled with hearts so filled with so much disappointment that it finally seems as if many are both giving up on their dreams and maybe even starting hope that they don’t have any more?

Why has this world become whatever this is that this is? Why is it so hard these days to find those good things for which we had hoped or still do hope? Why is love such the loss as it’s found in that life we never lived? Why is friendship so fragile and often faulty? Why is religion so interested in things that get dusty? Why are there so many rules when it seems that so many don’t care to abide by them? Why have we all these excuses and why do we continue to hide behind them?

What are we hiding from?

Failure? Looking foolish? Feeling rejected?

Being again disappointed?

Indeed, judging by the way we act, the way we talk, the way we look, the way we walk, you’d think that we’d all become so afraid of disappointment that we’d just about rather not try for anything else in life than to risk our being disappointed again.

And I get it, disappointment is truly deprecating unto the dreams we’ve had for things we then don’t.

Nobody enjoys having all these amazing ideas for what would then amount to a life measured the same only to watch them all, usually one by one, fall and fade away.

It’s misery to the 10th degree.

But friends, is disappointment truly so miserable that we should settle upon a life spent miserly in regard to hope, excitement, any and every opportunity which may so happen to still wait for us to dare take it for whatever it’s meant to become?

Indeed, are we so afraid of being disappointed that we’re truly contented with a life spent living not giving any more hope to very much at all?

Is hope something we should refuse to spend?

Can we run out of it?

Have we run out of it?

Truth is that at times I think we have. It’s just like the writer laying it down here in Lamentations, a book written lamenting the outcomes found by those who both were the Lord’s and yet forgot despite all the times that He’d proven willing to overlook all the times that they’d disappointed Him.

We always manage to spin it around and make it seem as if we’re always the only ones wronged.

That it’s our lives that are always unfair. That our not getting the sum of everything we’d come to want is proof of our being victims of some villain who’s then apparently just unwilling, unwanting for our to be happy, to feel whole. Yes, we’ve chosen for an approach to life in which all of life is revolving always around us and what we want. But sadly our wants are so often for but one moment.

And so long as we find nor feel disappointment in that moment, well then we’re none too quick to risk whatever the consequences may happen to be because they’re costs that we, in that moment, just can’t see.

Until you’re 38 and lying awake at the end of one of the best dreams you’ve ever had of the life you’ve spent your whole life wanting to have only to lay there in the midst of a reality breaking your heart as another new day has begun to start of the life you’ve ended up with at what is now the end of decades spent doing the wrong things that were designing the disappointment of your realizing that that beautiful dream is probably the closest you’ll ever get to finding or feeling the real thing.

And that’s a disappointment so crushing that words simply don’t exist to define it.

Trust me, as you can probably tell, words are what I do!

But of all the words I’ve ever written or read, there isn’t a single one that’s able to encompass the death it feels to have dreams so real, so beautiful that sadly never came true and still some that probably never will.

In fact that’s why I asked if perhaps death itself were to prove the end of disappointment.

Because it may be that only once we’ve left this life that we’ve all managed to screw up so badly that we could, in hope, find that promised eternity in which everything will again be renewed and forever go the way it was always supposed to.

For one of the only hopes that I still have that hasn’t itself died is that there is a place where there is a life that I’ve not ruined or wasted or taken so for granted that I spent it doing everything counterproductive to the dreams for those things that I, even at 38, refuse to let go even despite how I know my life’s gone.

There has to be a place where everything goes right, where everything works out, where hope doesn’t fail or friendship prove fragile. There has to be a place where love isn’t lost and nor then are we.

There has to be a place where it’s still okay to dream because they actually come true.

Why else would He give us the ability to hope, the opportunity to dream, the bold audacity to imagine those things that are indeed so good, so uplifting, so special and meaningful?

And why can feel the despair that is disappointment if not to inspire us to stop giving up so easily and settling instead for always something lesser?

I actually believe that that’s what disappointment is. It’s not the unfair things that we feel we don’t deserve to have to endure, though they are disappointing. It’s not the things that others do unto us that, contrary to the rule golden, we’d never imagine doing to them. It’s not the grand expectations of some life lived on vacations afforded by the millions we’ve made nor the luxurious escape to some massive mansion we’ve bought all falling short because we live in an apartment and off of fast food eaten in a car that couldn’t take us much further than the city limit sign.

Those may all prove somewhat disappointing too.

But I believe that disappointment at its most true is found and felt in those moments in which we realize that it was our choices that cost us those things for which we had dreamed that were honest, that were true, that were wanted simply because they would have made life in fact more right, more whole, more meaningful.

For it’s one thing to not become rich and famous. All of us know what that’s like, and, well, we’re all still doing alright.

But it’s another brand of sadness and sorrow to know that even something so simple as a relationship, a good, honest friendship has become, at our hands, a likely impossibility to find. Because, as opposed to mansions and millions that some may still be disappointed should they never have or hold, watching something that God intended go up in smoke because of the life we chose, it’s brutal in every possible way. Because all things that God made are good, and our not getting to experience then what He said is good is in fact so bad, so sad that it’s enough to shatter you.

Brings you to the very end of yourself at which point you find there’s thankfully no rope left because you’ve heard of what a few have done because they’d had enough, both of the life they’d chose and the rope it proved to hold.

And ‘tis a scary place when a soul runs out of hope.

Because, well, where do you go? What do you say? How do you pray when all you have to say is that all of life hasn’t gone the way you truly wanted it to? What can you pray when all you have to say is that you’re sorry, knowing still that it’s not enough to achieve in us a do over? What can you pray when you’re so disappointed in yourself, in your life, in your choices that you can only imagine that He’s equally disheartened?

Indeed, where does it leave us when we’ve so betrayed us that we don’t even have it left in us to believe that He wants anything to do with us?

After all, it was always our choices that cost us those consequences of that life we could have lived that would have been undeniably better than the one we’ve lived instead. It was our decision to settle so often for all that was easy, safe, basically assured. It was our lusts that placed our trusts in idols that turned to rust and pictures that caked in dust and love that turned out to be nothing but a script read by some paid actor that didn’t do what they did for pleasure but rather just because they could.

Yes, it has always been our call to chase after what looked good, felt good, sounded good, seemed good.

It was us who chose to trust in only us to determine what good was and how it was apparently always supposed to be easy to find and effortless to feel.

It was us who failed life, not life that’s failed us.

No, of all the disappointments we’ve ever felt, a fair 99% have been solely our own doing as were designed inside a way of life in which we did things without thinking them through, said things the same, didn’t say or do those other things we were afraid to because we just knew that they’d leave us disappointed whenever they didn’t go the way we wanted them to.

We didn’t apply for that dream job because we were terrified to leave the comfy confines of our normal routine. So we stayed where we were and awoke disappointed every day as we wondered what it might have been like if we had. We didn’t take that trip with our family as we were busy with school or work and just couldn’t risk taking the time off and maybe falling behind. So we worked overtime saving up for what would hopefully be another chance that never came.

We didn’t ask the question that could have led to buying a ring someday, a family on the way, trips to take and memories to make of a life so filled with so much love that it was undeniable that it came straight from Him above. Rather we stayed so lonely and afraid that we made it to 38 only to have dreams be the things we now have to live that kind of life through as it seems a little more every day that our lives are nearly through and there’s not much time left to find what we haven’t even tried to for too long now.

We are disappointment. We are disappointing. We are disappointed, in life yes, but that because of us.

We’re the ones who deny the risk and reject the chance and make the choice to listen to that voice that tells us that we need to do only whatever helps us, only whatever makes us look good, only whatever promises to make us feel good. We’re the ones who willfully trade our splendor away for what instead proves a life so slender and skinny and hopeless and unhappy.

Because disappointment is a symptom of poor choices made where better ones were equally available.

And yeah, in this world we’re bound to be disappointed by the things others do around us. This is growing undeniably more evident every single day. I just about can’t bear to be online anymore as it’s all just a nonstop and fully stocked disappointment store packed with posts and plastered with videos of so much that’s so unhappy and unhealthy and unhelpful in terms of hope or peace or love or mercy.

This world is crumbling and it sure seems to be in a hurry to get there to that rock bottom that everyone seems somehow still oblivious to.

And yes, it’s disappointing to watch so many give up so much of what they could be. It’s disappointing to see so many still settling for a way of life that obviously makes them unhappy. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to witness so very many opt for a life in which they’re so very unhealthy that everything from their bodies to their relationships are falling apart.

But I fear we only notice those disappointing things in others because we’re terrified of sitting inside the many disappointments we’ve allowed for in our own lives.

We don’t want to think about all the things we’ve cost ourselves in our having bought that way of life we’ve settled for that is nothing like the version we’d been hoping for. We don’t want to think about all the regret we have because of all the risk we missed. We don’t want to accept the fact that our lives are bad not because God’s not good but because we’ve never tried to live up to that life that He created us to live.

Because we don’t want to admit that it was us who chose to settle, to compromise, to wake up so many days waving goodbye to the better life simply because it existed on the other side of risk, of effort, of failure and our finding in it not the finish line but rather a reason to keep going, to keep trying, to ask just one more time for one more chance to have that dance that this life could have been, should have been, would have been had we not been so afraid to be what we ended up being anyway:

Disappointed.

Indeed, we give away so many opportunities at a life so amazing because we’re afraid that were we to try, we’d probably only fail or fall short or look foolish. And so we end up settling for being disappointed right from the start all so that we don’t have to have the heart that’s willing to keep fighting for something better. We can just opt for everything lesser and spend our days lost in wonder as to what might have been.

And so here we sit, each of us so sad and filled with sorrow and overcome so often with shame because of lives so plain, so boring, so bland, so far away from what we’d always hoped they could have been. All because we learned that hope isn’t an easy thing and that it doesn’t just show up because we hope it will.

Rather hope is a war that asks us to fight every single day for whatever it is that we hope for.

And disappointment is the outcome we all seem to know so much more because we’ve surrendered that war. We gave up that fight. We became a part of the world that chooses to die a little more every day inside a life in which we all awake to just give away all the better that we were created to be and given so many opportunities to know.

All because hope is hard.

So hard in fact that we eventually just lose the ability to hold onto it anymore.

And yeah, the world we’re in definitely isn’t doing us any favors as it seems that there’s not much good to be found here these days.

Does that mean we should give up? That we should let go? That we should go ahead and sell off whatever hope we still hold?

That sure does seem the easiest, safest, most assured bet.

But a life without hope isn’t one I want to live.

Because the truth is that we can only give up on so much before we’ve simply got nothing left to live for. And while it seems that we might be just about to that point, the truth is that we only ever fully arrive when we agree to let hope die.

So don’t.

No matter what. Doesn’t matter how disappointing this world becomes or how disappointed in yourself you may be.

You’re alive ain’t you?

So try. Get up. Brush yourself off. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and try.

Might you still fail? Yeah.

Will that be disappointing? Sure.

But is it not only doubly disappointing to not try and end up disappointed anyway?

What do we have to lose?

Other than hope itself?

I know it may seem like far too much is gone and thus not much remains. But nothing is ever gone until we ourselves decide to stop chasing after it.

And while that’s been a choice we’ve all made, doesn’t have to be the same one we keep making.

Maybe all hope is gone. But I want to know for sure and so I’ll keep looking for it even though time’s running out and this world’s losing its mind.

Doesn’t matter.

For again, we’re all still alive and so it seems God’s not done with us and so we shouldn’t be either.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold