The Practice of Accepting Disappointment

One of the most important habits you can develop is the habit of accepting that life is full of disappointments. One of the best ways to grow in contentment is to accept the inevitability of discontentment. One of the ways you can be most joyful in life is to be realistic about life, to know that the people in it will so often fail to meet your expectations. Having admitted all of this, you can embrace it as the way life is and even the way God means for it to be.

Your church will disappoint you. The pastor will preach some weak sermons, the elders will make some poor decisions, and the members will fail to share every one of your burdens and minister to every one of your sorrows. You will be tempted to become discontent with your church and begin to cast wistful eyes toward other congregations. You will begin to wonder if the path to joy involves picking up and moving on.

Your husband will disappoint you. He will fail to please you, fail to fulfill you, fail to be all you want him to be. You will be given too little attention, sinned against too often, hear too little of your love language. You will be tempted to become discontent with him, to demand more, and to insist that peace will come only on the other side of his personal reformation. You may even be tempted to leave him altogether and start over with someone who promises more.

Your sex life will disappoint you, the wonder of the early days soon giving way to the struggles that come with too little opportunity or too little willingness, too much demand or too much distraction. How many people have made shipwrecks of marriage, family, and ministry because they could not accept the disappointment of a sex life that is imperfect and less than completely fulfilling?

Your parents will disappoint you and so too your children. Your friends will disappoint you and so too your relatives. All will fail you at many times and in many ways. And, of course, you will do the same for them. Your church will disappoint you and you’ll disappoint your church. Your spouse will disappoint you and you’ll disappoint your spouse. Your sex life will disappoint you and it will disappoint your spouse as well. No one will ever fully meet your hopes, desires, and expectations. No one ever can fully meet your hopes, desires, and expectations. And you can’t meet theirs.

I acknowledge that this could all sound discouraging and depressing. I acknowledge that it could be taken as a call to apathy, an excuse to give up effort altogether. But that would be the wrong response. The right response is to accept the reality of imperfection and to be content with discontentment. The right response is to understand that nobody and nothing can live up to your expectations and that nobody and nothing is meant to.

Christians speak often of the ways that beauty and pleasure are meant to direct us beyond themselves to what is ultimately beautiful and ultimately pleasurable. Beauty evokes wonder and wonder evokes worship and worship evokes longing. In that way, the beauties of this earth direct us to the perfect and complete beauties that we will experience in God’s presence. The longing and the ache are a feature rather than a bug, for they point us to the time and place when our hopes will finally be realized and our longings finally satisfied. And it seems to me that there is a way in which disappointment can function in a similar way.

Instead of being discouraged by disappointment, would it not be better to allow it to remind you of the state of this world and, better, the state of the world to come? Would it not be better to allow it to remind you that this world is not meant to completely fulfill you and not meant to satisfy your every longing? Would it not be better to let it increase your desire to be with God in that place where all disappointments will be taken away? And then to enjoy life as it is, not as you long for it to be?

God’s gifts are good and are meant to be enjoyed. Yet none of them can deliver all that they promise. Each of them brings a level of satisfaction but also a level of disappointment, a sense of beauty but also a sense of longing for more. We need to be wary of that longing for more because it can motivate us to make poor decisions or even depraved ones. It can lead us to forsake the ones we love and be discontent in even their greatest efforts and best attempts to love. It can lead us to act rashly and in ways that hurt others and dishonor God.

So when you encounter life’s disappointments, do not be surprised and do not be dismayed. Do not allow them to cause you to turn aside or turn away from those who love you and those God has called you to love. Learn to accept them as an inevitable reality of life in this world. Instead of resenting them, embrace them and allow them to deepen your love and your longing for the only One who will never let you down.