Defeating Disappointments
One of the most important keys to living your best life now, as well as moving forward into the great future God has for you, is learning how to overcome the disappointments in life. Because disappointment can pose such formidable obstacles to letting go of the past, you need to be sure you have dealt with this area before taking the next step to living at your full potential.
Let’s be honest; all of us face disappointments from time to time. No matter how much faith you have or how good of a person you are, sooner or later, something (or somebody!) will shake your faith to its foundations. It may be something simple, such as not getting that promotion you really hoped for; not dosing the big sale that you worked on so hard; not qualifying for a loan to buy that house that you really wanted. Or, it may be something more serious—a marriage relationship falling apart, the death of a loved one, or an incurable, debilitating illness. Whatever it is, that disappointment possesses the potential to derail you and wreck your faith. That’s why it is vital that you recognize in advance that disappointments will come, and that you learn how to stay on track and deal with them when they do.
Often, defeating disappointments and letting go of the past are the flip sides of the same coin, especially when you are disappointed in yourself. When you do something wrong, don’t hold on to it and bear yourself up about it. Admit it, seek forgiveness, and move on. Be quick to let go of your mistakes and failures, hurts, pains, and sins.
The disappointments that disturb us the most, however, are usually those caused by other people. Many individuals who have been hurt by others are missing out on their new beginnings because they keep reopening old wounds. But no matter what we have gone through, no matter how unfair it was, or how disappointed we were, we must release it and let it go.
Somebody may have walked out on you. Somebody may have done you a great wrong. You may have prayed fervently for a loved one’s life to be saved, yet your loved one died. Leave that with God and go on with your life. The Bible says, “The secret things belong to God.” Leave them there.
Disappointments almost always accompany setbacks. When you suffer loss, of course you will feel strong emotions. Nobody expects you to be an impenetrable rock or an inaccessible island in the sea. Not even God expects you to be so tough that you simply ignore the disappointments in life, shrugging them off as though you are impervious to pain. No, when we experience failure or loss, it’s natural to feel remorse or sorrow. That’s the way God made us. If you lose your job, most likely you are going to experience a strong sense of disappointment. If you go through a broken relationship, that’s going to hurt. If you’ve ever lost a loved one, there’s a time of grieving, a time of sorrow. That is normal and to be expected.
But if you are still grieving and feeling sorrow over a disappointment that took place a year or more ago, something is wrong! You are hindering your future. You must make a decision that you are going to move on. It won’t happen automatically. You will have to rise up and say, “I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.”
The enemy loves to deceive us into wallowing in self-pity, fretting, feeling sorry for ourselves, or having a chip on our shoulders. “Why did this happen to me? God must not love me. He doesn’t answer my prayers. Why did my marriage end in divorce? Why did my business not succeed? Why did I lose my loved one? Why didn’t things work out in my life?”
Such questions may be valid, and may even be helpful to consider for a season, but after that, quit wasting your time trying to figure out something that you can’t change. You can’t unscramble eggs. What’s done is done, let the past be the past and go on. So you’ve suffered some setbacks; you didn’t get what you were praying about; things didn’t go your way. Friend, you are not alone. Many fine, upstanding individuals have experienced something similar.
Don’t Become Trapped in the Past
My dad married at a very early age probably not one of the best decisions Daddy ever made—and, although he went into the relationship with the best of intentions, unfortunately, things didn’t work out. The marriage failed. Daddy was heartbroken and devastated. He thought sure that his ministry was over, that God’s blessings had lifted from his life. He didn’t think he would ever preach again, much less have a family. Dealing with his divorce was the darkest hour of my dad’s life. He could easily have given up and sunk into a black hole of depression. I’m sure he was tempted to feel condemned and guilty. No doubt, he was tempted to internalize the blame and not accept God’s forgiveness. He could have allowed that disappointment to thwart him from fulfilling his destiny.
But years later, Daddy told me how he had to shake himself out of his doldrums. He had to quit mourning over what he had lost and start receiving God’s mercy and love.
The Bible says, “The mercies of God are fresh and new every single day” God knows we’re going to make mistakes. God knows we are not perfect, so He provides fresh, new mercy and grace every day. God doesn’t condone our sins; He doesn’t wink at our wrongdoing. But God doesn’t automatically condemn us either. The Bible says, “The Lord . . . is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”
If you’re going to avoid getting trapped in your past, you must learn to forgive yourself. You must be willing to accept God’s mercy. You can’t be so critical of yourself that you won’t receive what God has to offer.
Maybe you made some bad choices, and now you are trying to correct the things you’ve done wrong. That’s noble, and to the extent that you can make restitution for any hurt you have inflicted on others, you should attempt to do so. But you must understand, you can’t always repair every broken piece of your life or somebody else’s life; you can’t fix every mistake or clean up every mess that you have made. You may be trying to pay a debt that you cannot possibly pay. Perhaps it is time that you simply receive God’s mercy and forgiveness so you can move on with your life.
Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that you take the easy way out, ignoring or abdicating responsibility for your actions. Quite the contrary. As much as you are able, you should seek forgiveness from and make restitution to those whom you have hurt. But frequently, little can be done to correct the past. When you know the situation is over and done, the best thing to do is just move on.
My dad made a decision that he was not going to allow his past to poison his future. He accepted God’s forgiveness and mercy, and little by little, God began to do a fresh work in Daddy’s life, restoring his spiritual strength as well as his ministry Daddy began to preach once again, and to do what God wanted him to do. He began to fulfill God’s destiny for his life.
Yet Daddy never dreamed he would ever get married again and have a family. Then one day my dad met an attractive young woman with an unusual name—Dodie—who was working as a nursing student at one of the local hospitals where Daddy visited some of his ailing church members.
Daddy fell head over heels for the woman, and he started looking for any possible reason he could find to go to that hospital so he could see her. I mean, he would visit your great-aunt’s third cousin’s next-door neighbor if you asked him to! He was almost hoping members of his congregation would get sick so he could go to the hospital.
The young nursing student didn’t recognize what was going on. But Daddy was at the hospital so much, she once told one of her friends, “That minister has the sickest congregation I’ve ever seen!” She didn’t realize he was thereto see her.
You’ve probably already guessed that Daddy married Dodie Pilgrim, and God blessed them with four average children and one exceptional child, whom they named Joel!
God not only restored my dad’s ministry. He increased it. Daddy traveled all over the world for more than fifty years, ministering to millions of people. He founded lakewood Church in Houston in the late 1950s and pastored the congregation for more than forty years.
God gave my dad a new family too. Today, all five of his children are active in the ministry, carrying on the work that God started in Daddy many years ago. But I don’t believe any of that would have happened had Daddy focused on his disappointments, refusing to let go of the past.
God wants to do more than you can ask or think as well. He wants to restore good things to you in abundance. If you will focus on the right things, God will take your most horrendous battlefield and turn it into your greatest blessing field.
I’m not saying to take the easy way and just bail out of a marriage or some other difficult situation. Daddy went through hell on earth. If you knew the circumstances surrounding the divorce he experienced, you would understand that he didn’t take the easy road. But neither did he allow himself to he trapped in the past. Let go of your past disappointments, failures, and sins. God wants to do a new thing. He wants to restore to you in abundance everything the enemy has stolen from you. Quit dwelling on those disappointments, mourning over something you’ve lost, and start believing God for a fantastic future!
I’m often asked to pray for individuals who are believing for a relationship to be restored. Some are praying for their marriage to be restored; others are asking God to heal a business situation or a rift between coworkers. I encourage people to persevere, to continue praying, and believing for good things to happen. But we must also understand that God will not change another person’s will. He has given every human being free will to choose which way he or she will go, whether to do right or wrong. Sometimes, no matter how hard we pray or how long we stand in faith, things don’t turn out as we hope.
You may be heartbroken over a failed relationship or a bankrupt business, but I challenge you to not stay heartbroken. Don’t carry around all that hurt and pain year after year. Don’t let rejection fester inside you, poisoning your future. Let it go. God has something new in store for you.
When God allows one door to close, He will open another door for you, revealing something bigger and better. The Bible says that God will take the evil that the enemy brings into our lives, and if we’ll keep the right attitude, He’ll turn it around and use it for our good. God wants to take your scars and turn them into stars. He wants to take those disappointments and turn them into reappointments. But understand, whether you will experience all those good things in your future depends to a large extent on your willingness to let go of the past.
You can’t put a question mark where God has put a period. Avoid the tendency to dwell on what you could have done, which college you should have attended, which career you should have pursued, or that person you wish you would have married. Quit living in a negative frame of mind, stewing about something that is over and done. Focus on what you can change, rather than what you cannot. Shake yourself out of that “should have, could have, would have” mentality and move on. Don’t let the regrets of yesterday destroy the hopes and dreams of tomorrow.
Surely, we all can look back and see things in our lives that we wish we would have done differently. But the Bible says, “Make the most of each day” Yesterday is gone; tomorrow may not come. You must live for today. Start right where you are. You can’t do anything about what’s gone, but you can do a great deal about what remains.
You may have made some poor choices that have caused you awful heartache and pain. Perhaps you feel that you have blown it, that your life is in shambles and beyond repair. You may feel disqualified from God’s best, convinced that you must settle for second best the rest of your life because of the poor decisions you made. But friend, God desires your restoration even more than you do! If you’ll let go of the past and start living each day with faith and expectancy, God will restore everything that the enemy has stolen from you.
Backup Plans
Let’s be frank; sometimes, because of wrong choices, disobedience, or sin, we miss out on God’s “Plan A.” The good news is, God has a “Plan B,” a “Plan C.,” and whatever it takes to get us to His final destination for our lives.
Worse yet, maybe you weren’t the person who made the bad choices, but somebody else’s foolish decisions caused you to experience wrenching heartache and pain. Regardless, you must stop dwelling on it. Let the past be the past. Forgive the person who caused you the trouble and start afresh right where you are today. If you continue to dwell on those past disappointments, you will block God’s blessings in your life today. It’s simply not worth it.
The prophet Samuel suffered a horrible disappointment in his relationship with the first king of Israel, a man named Saul. As a young man, Saul was humble and shy. Then, at God’s direction, Samuel picked him out of the crowd and declared him to be the king of Israel. Samuel did his best to help Saul be a king who was pleasing unto God.
Unfortunately Saul refused to live in obedience to God, and God eventually rejected him as the king. Imagine how Samuel must have felt. Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time, effort, money, emotion, and energy in a relationship; you did your best to make it work out. But for some reason, things got off course, and now you feel as though you have been robbed.
That’s how Samuel must have felt. Devastated. Heartbroken. Disappointed. But as Samuel was nursing his wounded heart, God asked him an important question: “Samuel, how long are you going to mourn over Saul?” God is asking us similar questions today: “How long are you going to mourn over that failed relationship? How long are you going to mourn over your broken dreams?” That’s the problem with excessive mourning. When we focus on our disappointments, we stop God from bringing fresh new blessings into our lives.
God went on to tell Samuel, “Fill up your horn with oil and be on your way. I’m sending you to the house of Jesse for I have chosen one of his sons to be the new king.” In other words, God said, “Samuel, if you will quit mourning and get going, I’ll show you a new, better beginning.”
Remember, God always has another plan. Yes, Saul was God’s first choice, but when Saul wouldn’t walk in obedience, God didn’t say, “well, Samuel, I’m so sorry. Saul blew it and that ruins everything.” No, God always can come up with another plan. If you will stop feeling sorry for yourself and, instead, do what the Bible says, your future can be brighter than ever.
Notice what God told Samuel to do: Fill your horn with oil. Have a fresh new attitude. Put a smile on your face. Get the spring back in your step and be on your way.
Samuel could have said, “God, I just can’t do this. I’m too heartbroken. I gave so much of myself in that relationship and now it’s gone, wasted.”
But if Samuel would not have trusted God at that point, he might have missed King David, one of the greatest kings in the Bible. Similarly if we wallow in our disappointments, we risk missing out on the new things God wants to do in our lives. It’s time to get up and get going. God has another plan for you. And it is better than you can imagine!
My sister Lisa and her husband, Kevin, tried for years to have a baby, but Lisa could not conceive. She and Kevin longed to have a child, so Lisa tried all sorts of medical procedures, enduring a long, drawn-out process that included several operations, all to no avail. Finally her doctor said, “Lisa, let’s try one more surgery. Hopefully this time it will help you to get pregnant.” So she went through that, and she and Kevin tried for another year or so, but she still couldn’t conceive.
At the end of that process, Lisa was exhausted, emotionally and physically drained. She went back to the doctor one more time to see if there was any possibility of her becoming pregnant, and the doctor offered no hope. “Lisa, I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but we’ve done everything we can possibly do. You’re just not going to be able to have a child.”
Lisa was heartbroken. She thought, God, we’ve endured all this time and effort. We tried so hard. We prayed and believed. We spent all this money. God, it’s all such a waste. It seems so unfair.
Sometimes we don’t understand why certain things don’t work out. I can’t tell you why one person is healed and another person is not, when they are both praying and believing and standing in faith. But we must get to that point where we trust God, even when we don’t understand Him. Some things we shouldn’t even try to figure out; we should let them alone and go on. God is in control. The Bible says, “God’s ways are higher and better than our ways.” God knows what He is doing. He knows what is best for us. And God always has another plan. If you’ll quit dwelling on your disappointments, God will show you what the plan is.
That’s exactly what Kevin and Lisa did. They finally came to the point where they said, “God, we’re putting this totally in Your hands. We’ve done everything we know to do. Yes, we’re disappointed, but we’re not going to be trapped in the past. We’re going to move on with our lives, knowing You are in control. You are a good God, and You have good things in store for us.”
A few months later, they received a telephone call from a dear friend of ours, Nancy Alcorn. Nancy is the founder and president of Mercy Ministries of America, a ministry that takes care of young women at risk, including those dealing with premarital pregnancies. When a young woman gives birth to a baby and wishes to give up the child for adoption, Mercy Ministries helps place that child with a loving Christian husband and wife.
“Lisa, I don’t even know why I’m calling you,” Nancy said. “I normally would not do this, but we have a teenager who is about to give birth to twin girls, and we were just wondering if you and Kevin might be interested in adopting them? It may not work out, though. I know you and Kevin have all the other qualifications, but one of the birth mother’s stipulations is that her baby be placed in a family with twins in their background.”
Little did Nancy know that Kevin, Lisa’s husband, has a twin sister, and it was always his dream that he would one day raise twins. God answered the specific prayer of a young lady giving up her baby for adoption, while fulfilling a dream of Kevin’s and Lisa’s at the same time! A few months later, Lisa and Kevin were able to adopt, at childbirth, two beautiful baby girls. God had another plan!
But if Lisa had not been willing to let go of her own plan, if she had not been willing to get over her disappointments, I don’t believe God’s new plan would have opened up for her and Kevin.
Maybe you have put a lot of time, effort, and resources into your plan. You’ve prayed about it; you have believed. Maybe you have spent a lot of money. But now you can clearly see that the door is closing, and you are disappointed. You say, “God, how can I ever let go of this? It’s going to be such a waste. I put so much into it, and all I can see is failure.”
Right there is where you must dare to trust God, knowing that He has another plan, a better plan. He wants to do something new in your life. And you must let go of the old so you will be ready and able to receive the new plan God has for you. God will do more than you can even ask or think.
Recently, Kevin and Lisa adopted another child, a baby boy Lisa quipped, “How about that! God has given me three beautiful children, and I have not had to spend a single month being pregnant!”
We all encounter circumstances that can cause us to grow negative, bitter, or disappointed with ourselves or God. But I love what the apostle Paul said: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal.” In other words, Paul was saying, “I’m not going to dwell on yesterday’s disappointments or my past failures. I’m not going to think about what I would have done or should have done. I’m leaving all that behind, and I’m looking ahead for the good things God has in store for me.” That’s the kind of attitude we should have as well.
Every morning when you get up, refuse to dwell on what you did wrong the day before. Refuse to dwell on yesterday’s disappointments. Get up each day knowing that God is a loving and forgiving God, and He has great things in store for you.
Paul said, “I’m straining forward. I press toward the mark.” Those words imply a strong effort. It’s not always easy to get over some of those humps in the road, those disillusionments and disappointments. It’s going to take a strong will. Sometimes, it may take courage; sometimes nothing but faith in God and sheer determination will see you through. But you can say, “I refuse to be trapped in the past. I’m not going to let the past destroy my future. I’m pressing on. I’m straining forward, knowing that God has great things in store for me.”
When you make mistakes—and we all do—humble yourself and receive God’s forgiveness and mercy Be willing to forgive yourself. Don’t live in regret. Regret will only interfere with your faith. Faith must always be a present-tense reality, not a distant memory God will turn those disappointments around. He will take your scars and turn them into stars for His glory.
