Disappointment & Hope

Article Written for the Local Newspaper 4.25.2020

     Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about disappointment. I have been disappointed about so many different things. Holy Week is my favorite week out of the year because it is filled with many services and well-known songs that can be sung with passion and zeal.  They are hymns that are best sung by a sanctuary full of people, yet what I got was me singing them by myself with a couple people up in the balcony playing music and recording the service.  I have felt disappointed for my confirmation students who worked hard only to have their confirmation day delayed. I felt disappointed for the families who have simply had a brief graveside service to lay a loved one to rest. I can only imagine the disappointment being felt by school children specifically high school seniors who have lost so many things that adults cherish as great memories from their youth. I could go on and on, but I am sure you can fill in your own disappointments.

     The temptation is to simply feel sorry for ourselves and just allow our disappointment to consume us day after day. I think there is a time and a place for those feelings of sorrow, grief, and sadness. The Christian faith speaks to those realities of the human experience. It may come as a surprise to some but the main message of the Bible is not to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Rather the main message of the scriptures is about a God who came to us in the person of Jesus Christ and entered into a whole pile of disappointment. These disappointments ranged from the sins of people to the sicknesses of the world to the death that is all around us.  Jesus faced disappointments but he was willing to face those and go through those on your behalf to overcome those disappointments.

      For most of us, the disappointments that we are facing in our day to day lives are relatively minor for a few others though, they are major.  Yet even in the greatest of disappointments, we are invited to have hope and that when there is faith in Jesus Christ there is something beyond our disappointment. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14  But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.  For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. No matter the magnitude of the subject matter of our disappointment the hope we have is that Jesus has overcome it all.  No this doesn’t give us back some of the things that we have lost to this pandemic but it does give us something that will never let us down a savior and one who walks with us in the good and the bad.