The Purpose of Disappointment

A couple of weeks ago I posted about disappointment--how it seems to be necessary for maturing in our relationships with one another (I used my inability to build a real rocket ship for my son Davis as an example) and how it also seems necessary in terms of our relationship with God.

As I've been thinking about this over the past couple of weeks, it seems that a critical function that disappointment plays in our relationships both with people and with God is this: disappointment forces us to relate to the person or God as they really are.

This place on earth where this plays out with most relentless predictability is in marriage.

We come into marriage with an overly-glorified picture of who this person is. If you didn't have that, you wouldn't bother to get married to them in the first place. We always marry a person who is part real, part illusion. The percentage of "real" and "illusion" vary by personality and temperament.

Then the honeymoon is over. And the reason that's a cliche in our culture is for this very reason--you hit disappointment.

But the only way for their to be any real relating (and not a plastic, fake relating) is for the honeymoon to eventually be over. That's when the real intimacy begins. As long as you are attempting to be married to an illusion rather than a real person, true intimacy is impossible.

Unfortunately, at this stage there are paths other than intimacy that many people choose: going-through-the-motions or divorce. Many never make it to anything resembling real real relating, real intimacy. I'm just on the beginnings of the road myself.

It is easy for our picture of God to be either overly militant or (more likely in our time) overly drowsily grandfather-ish. We would like for God to pat us on the head and grant us what we'd like and not bother with us in too many other ways.

But to relate to God as a real Being, not as a product of our own illusions and wish-fulfillment, means that we must at some point bump up against something that is solidly "Other." God is not at our beck and call. He is Reality; so very real that we barely exist compared to him. And he cannot be used, manipulated, or controlled. He must be related to as a Person, not a vending machine in the sky.

Sometimes that Other-ness is hard to accept and costs us a great deal of pain and sadness. Often, just like in marriage, people take the two diminishing-returns paths: going-through-the-motions faith or divorce.

But to persevere through this pain of disappointment is the path to life, to real intimacy with God and with all that he has made for us to enjoy. The fires of disappointment burn us. But they also burn off much that needs to die if we are to make our way through to the High Country, to life in the Land of the Trinity.