Healing from disappointment is not easy. Too many Christians act as though reciting Bible verses and doing all the right spiritual activities will magically make disappointment and pain go away. Like you can wake up one day and everything is just better. I am sure that has been true for some people, and I am also sure that it has not been true for many others.
Jesus is a miracle-worker, the God of the breakthrough. But his miracles aren’t magic formulas. His work in our lives is always in partnership with our faith—faith that is both a gift and a journey. Trust, hope, peace—the inner workings of the Spirit—grow in our hearts over time.
Jesus never offered to fix all our problems, but he does offer to go with us on the journey. Real life with Jesus takes real inner work. This work is, of course, empowered by his grace, but it’s still intentional and purposeful and sometimes very hard. Saying that doesn’t diminish the miracle of Christ’s power in our lives.
It’s been six years since Mark and I stepped down as pastors of the church we planted. Six years since we buried that dream. We did it for a good reason—for the sake of one of our kids, who had been through the unimaginable and needed a space to heal. But that didn’t make it easier to lose our dream, to walk away from the vision and people we had so deeply loved and invested in.
It has taken us six years (and counting) to sort through the layers of this loss. God has done miracles in our hearts and accelerated our process, yet it has still been a process. Every step of the healing journey has been an intentional choice. And every step has required courage.
For several months after we moved, I found myself feeling continually weary with the grief of what we’d walked through—the loss of the church, the losses in our child's life, the loss of friends and community. Starting over in a new community and making new friends is hard under normal circumstances. In the middle of grief, it felt impossible.
It took everything in me to get out of bed every day, to keep up with my household responsibilities. The simplest things, like making breakfast or folding laundry, felt intolerably hard. I remember lying on my bed one afternoon and feeling like I just wanted to give up. My chest ached. It took so much effort to move. And I felt terribly alone. Who could possibly understand the complexity of what we’d been through?
Outside my window, the sky was brilliant, golden and blue and shimmery. I love to soak up a beautiful sky. It is one of my simple pleasures. But that day, as I looked impassively from my dark room out at the bright air, I felt the disparity between my internal world and the world outside. As simple as it seems, that moment has crystalized in my memory, because it was the moment I realized I had forgotten how to find pleasure in simple things. It was the moment I realized my heart had become sick.
That realization spurred me into pursuit of some of the principles in my book. Without realizing it, I had slipped into a deep disappointment—with myself, with God, with life. I knew where that would lead, and it was somewhere I didn’t want to go.
Of course, God met me in it and walked me through it. He showed up for me again and again until one day I realized I could hope again. I started to dream, to think about what might be possible.
Jesus was wearing away the numbness and cynicism in my heart and teaching me to trust him again. But it didn’t happen in a moment or by accident. It happened as he patiently walked with me and invited me on the journey toward healing. As I allowed him to touch my wounded places and address the lies I was believing. As I kept getting out of bed every morning and asking for his help and facing the hard work of dealing with the ache in my heart.
In my experience, the journey out of disappointment has always been a process.
Let’s not pretend that Jesus’ presence in our lives means that healing and breakthrough are always easy. When speaking to his disciples of the coming persecution and tribulation that would culminate in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem, Jesus said, “These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Jesus’ response to suffering was not to rescue his disciples from it, but to empower them to walk in his victory through it. The same is true for us.
Whether our healing is the work of a moment or the work of a lifetime, we can know that he is with us in it, and he has overcome the world on our behalf. It doesn’t always feel like we are winning when we’re in the middle of the ache of disappointment, but we are.
If we stay close to him, if we refuse to give up, we will get through. We will experience his peace, his courage, his victory, his hope. This is the truth about overcoming disappointment—it requires real work in tandem with the Holy Spirit, the great helper.
For more on this, check out my book, The Way Back to Hope.
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