Disappointment with God
What can we do when it seems God lets us down
On our last home assignment, we rented a missionary house near my hometown. It was a blessing in many ways, especially in that it had a well-stocked library. It was interesting, but not surprising, that the library included three copies of Philip Yancey’s book Disappointment with God. The missionary life has many disappointments. How we deal with the times we feel let down, especially when we feel that way about God, is important. These feelings don’t need to define us, but God can indeed use them for good in our lives.
One statistic says the biggest challenge for missionary organizations is getting missionaries to return for a second term. They leave for a myriad of reasons, but those reasons might be summarized best by saying the missionary was disappointed—with ministry, coworkers, and even himself or herself. Disappointment is usually not one big thing but “petty disappointments [that] tend to accumulate over time.”1 Taken by themselves, we could deal with them, but over time become: “I wonder. Can God be trusted? If so many small prayers go unanswered, what about the big ones?”2 The question we need to ask ourselves is, Is this a three-day story?3
The Bible is full of third-day stories: Esther praying before facing the king to save her people, Jonah in the fish, etc. But the most famous is Jesus’ resurrection. The Bible gives a lot of space in the New Testament to talk about Good Friday and Easter. But little is said about Saturday. Saturday, for the disciples, was the day they reflected on the fact that maybe Jesus had failed, and they felt deeply let down. C.S. Lewis noted, “When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing [God], so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.” Lewis goes on to contrast this with when you feel your need is desperate and you can’t find help anywhere, so you try to go to God “and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.”4 After Jesus’ death, the disciples were deeply disappointed by the silence.
Perhaps, you are in a third-day story and it’s Saturday. It is the day of silence. For some of us, the “day” has lasted a long time. And for those of us who have been disappointed in missionary life where we felt led and called by God, he seems especially quiet.
The way to deal with a third-day story is first to find out if that is what is happening in my life. To do that, I need to get to the “third day,” and that often means I need to wait. Unfortunately, the idea of waiting is never something we enjoy. Most of us get impatient waiting in the line at the grocery store. And waiting when we feel God has let us down seems impossible. But there is something different in this waiting because we are with God. The seemingly impossible wait can best be endured by looking to the Scriptures for other such stories.
Scripture is full of encouraging third-day stories: Joseph waiting for years to confront his brothers, Abraham’s waiting until old age before God gave him a child, David’s desperate wait and flight from Saul before he became king as God promised, and many others. The ultimate might be Job’s story, where, after all his losses, he was able to meet with God one-on-one. Bible stories can comfort us during the most difficult times of disappointment, especially as we see other people who have endured and come out on the other end closer to God than before.
Missionary lives are full of disappointments. And though these are part of our story, they aren’t the whole story. They can actually be a “pause” in our story, or a Saturday in our third-day story. Waiting with God in our disappointments can actually result in good in our lives. And maybe “Resurrection Sunday” is right around the corner.
1. Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 13.
2. Ibid.
3. John Ortberg, “Between Despair and Joy,” FaithGateway, https://www.faithgateway.com/between-despair-and-joy (April 4, 2015). John Ortberg uses this phrase to refer to the story pattern of trouble, waiting for God, and deliverance.
4. C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (HarperOne, 2001), 5-6.