Earlier this year, I was working through my thoughts around prayer for healing. I thought I had a faith issue, that it was too small, too weak. In Romans 5:5 God assures me that
Hope in me does not disappoint
And in Matthew 21:22, his words promise me that:
If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.
However I felt disappointed, I had not always received what I asked for. I want to be a person of mountain-moving, mulberry tree-uprooting, everything-is-possible kind of faith not constantly wrestling doubt and fear but I often feel like the man in Mark 9:24 saying:
I believe, help my unbelief.
At a meeting in that same week, someone encouraged me, “don’t stop praying”. I realised I had backed off from praying for all sorts situations including some that were challenging, because I had not seen change and because doubt had crept in. In the same meeting, I found myself praying for healing for someone but felt like nothing happened. If I’m honest, I have sometimes avoided prayer for healing, leaving it to the “experts”. When I talked to God about it as I tried to understand my thoughts around these issues that had been exposed, he told me:
You are guarding your heart against hurt and disappointment. You have been scared to engage in prayer for people in case it doesn’t work the way you want.
I have prayed for healing and people got healed and there have also been many scenarios where I have prayed and people have not been healed. As a young Christian, my church family prayed for one of our elders, and another leader connected with our church family, who were very sick. Both of them died. I believe that, those of us who are Christians who believe in prayer for healing, who believe in a supernatural God, we need to engage with this, not rationalise it away, or minimise it. We need to learn to engage with disappointment when things don’t go the way we expect. I believe that 1 John 5:14-15 gives us a helpful first step
This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.
We need to ask God what he is doing, what he is asking us to pray, how he is asking us to pray. We need to pray according to his will. That could help us avoid some disappointment.
Early in 2021, shortly after I moved to Scotland, my mum was taken to hospital unconscious. After my brother phoned to let me know, I asked God what he was doing. In that moment, it seems easier to discern what the enemy is doing, but I am interested in what God is doing. He said he was taking her home! Consequently, I did not pray for healing. That would have led to disappointment. It was not a lack of faith but trusting in his ability to speak to me. To pray for healing would have gone against what he was doing. I prayed she would go in his timing and in peace.
There are multiple opportunities every day for seeds of disappointment to be sown into our lives. It is part of normal life on the earth. Relationships in particular, give many opportunities to be disappointed. Disappointment can be defined as:
The gap between what you hoped would happen and what actually happens.
We all have hopes, expectations, and dreams and then life happens, and not always how we want. We can try to control the pieces but jobs, or circumstances don’t work out how we thought, people get sick, relationships get interrupted, changed, or people move. People let us down. We let people down. We think things are going a certain way and some unforeseen circumstance can completely change the trajectory of our life. We live in a world that is not perfect. We are no longer in Eden where disappointment was not a thing. We try to find ways of navigating these curves in the road, the bumps in our journey by protecting our heart. Psalm 142:2 gives us a healthy way to navigate disappointment.
I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble.”
We need to be real with God and tell him how we feel. We see this on the road to Emmaus. They tell him all, summarising their thoughts in Luke 24:21
We had hoped he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.
They were disappointed because it didn’t look like they expected. In fact he did redeem Israel but because they were looking for something else, they missed it. That so often happens to us – we listen to the promises of God, or we pray and get a picture of what the outcome will look like in our heads. Our emotions become invested in this ‘answer’.
In Proverbs 4:20-24, we are exhorted:
My son, pay attention to what I say; listen closely to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body. Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.”
Unfortunately, we try to guard our heart by self protection. As I engaged with God in what he was exposing of this issue, this is what he said to me:
The issue of disappointment has opened you up to the lies of the enemy. It has brought pain, but it has also made you vulnerable to his deceptive schemes. It has led you away from me, from my paths into the wilderness of your own understanding and your own thinking. This is not about me being disappointed in you, I never am, my hopes are rightly placed. But this issue has caused you to believe lies about me, about yourself and about things of faith. It starts as a little fox as it were in the garden of your heart, but it can undermine so much if left untended. It can impact your whole relationship with me as well as others. Disappointment is not a little issue. It’s a thread that can bring down marriages, businesses, churches, ministries and so much more if allowed to fester.
We minimise and dismiss it as just the way life is. However, I believe God is asking us to engage with this, to sit with him and allow him to look at this with us. The Message version of Proverbs 13:12 tells us that:
Unrelenting disappointment leaves you heartsick
If our heart is sick, that is a problem, because as Matthews 12:34 reminds us:
… out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks
What’s in our heart comes out! Our words can release life or death, blessing or curse. We carry a fragrance in our heart, we bring an atmosphere. God once asked me,
What do you bring into the room?
When we have this issue of disappointment, it can poison our heart. The longer it is there, it poisons us and then it defiles the rooms that we are in, everyone around us, everything we are involved with. Even when we think we are doing good, it is like we have the wrong spirit behind it so it brings death instead of life, cursing instead of blessing. As God exposed this in me, I realised I had felt so heavy and tired and that what I was bringing into the room was heaviness and negativity.
Disappointment causes us to have a wrong focus, becoming focussed on all the negative things, what the enemy is doing, what’s wrong, seeing all the faults. It builds hopelessness, doubt, despair, unbelief. We end up discouraged, unable to receive from God or others.
It can bring passivity, where we just give up, and retreat. It leads to fatalism, “whatever, it’ll just be whatever”.
This is a list of some of the things that God has showed me have come from this issue of disappointment. It’s a shocking list and this is not to bring condemnation but to emphasise the significance because it impacts so much.
It brings bitterness, resentment, criticism, condemnation, accusation, cynicism, skepticism, eye-rolling and negativity, mocking, scorn, disdain, judgment.
Michal, David’s wife, goes from loving him, through a series of disappointments, starting with helping him escape, gets given to another man, gets taken back, discovers he has two other wives as well as concubines, and by the time he is dancing because the ark of the covenant returns to Jerusalem, disappointment has led to her despising him in her heart; she cannot celebrate with him and ends up barren for the rest of her life! Her disappointment leads to a fruitless, barren life. So sad.
It brings prayerlessness. God told me that it had robbed my family, and others, of my prayers, because I stopped praying.
Don’t stop praying!
It brings fear, anger, control, and manipulation as we try and manage circumstances keep ourselves safe. Procrastination, aversion to risk, hedging our bets and not making decisions until the last minute because we are not quite sure and we don’t want to be disappointed, is also part of our strategy.
Hardness of heart, and resistance to what God wants to do, is also part of the self focussed strategy. I resisted prayer, being enthusiastic about prayer, and the supernatural things of faith, in case I was disappointed. Without airbrushing, resistance to God = rebellion, disobedience.
We experience a lack of trust, lack of compassion, lack of gratitude, an inability, like Michal, to celebrate, to delight, to anticipate, to hope, to expect, to experience joy. In order to protect our heart from disappointment everything is just ‘OK’, no enthusiasm, no life, “keep it all on a level, don’t get too enthusiastic in case things don’t go well”.
It makes us look for formula, for certainty not risk, which is religion. We don’t get a formula, we get a relationship. Relationships bring risk.
Minimising, airbrushing away pain, declaring “everything is fine” but everything isn’t fine! All that brings confusion.
This is not to bring condemnation but hopefully recognition, insight, understanding. Leading us to ask the question:
Is there something, God, that you want to say to me about disappointment?
I want to see what God is doing but the disappointment had led me to a place where I couldn’t see seeds of life anywhere. Cynicism, and eye rolling, no ability to see the gold, to see the little seeds of hope. God led me back to Psalm 1:1
Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly
The counsel of the ungodly is listening to the lies of the enemy, listening to what is not of God. We need to be listening to his voice. He can always find something to celebrate, is always full of expectation and hope. He is the God of all hope.
Do not stand in the way of sinners.
God reminded me not to linger in the place of regret and lament over my sin, not to stand still in my disappointment and the resultant ugly fruit but to move from it. God has given us a route out of the way of sinners, through the confession of how things really are (pouring my heart out to him, giving the hurt and pain to him as I do so) and the repentance of renewing my mind as he leads me into truth and freedom.
Don’t sit in the seat of scoffers (or mockers).
The seat of scoffers had become my resting place as I sat in the negativity around what I was seeing. All the talk about God doing a new thing but I couldn’t see anything new. I couldn’t see anything positive, so I was unable to encourage where there is life. There’s power in my tongue, in my mouth. I don’t want to speak death, discouragement, negativity, criticism, and judgment. I want to be able to say “this thing, this right here, this is life-giving, let me bless that”.
Hope feels vulnerable. Hoping, expecting, looking forward to the future, makes us vulnerable because it might not go how we want. However, our hope is not in circumstances going how we want, in everything working out the way we like it to be. My hope is not in me in control of my life although it feels like it because our flesh feels safer. The hope that does not disappoint is a hope that is in God, fully trusting in Him. All of my weight, my expectations, dreams, anticipation for what’s coming put on him, not people, or myself. Romans 5:5 reminds us that
Hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
It is his love that drives out the fear; his perfect love that enables us to trust. He is trustworthy. He told me:
Your heart is safe with me. You are not powerless. You are not alone. Your prayers matter. You are never at a disadvantage in me.
We want to keep our hearts safe but he wants our hearts and he is the one who will keep our hearts safe. I can’t keep my heart safe, I have tried. Look at all the ways I tried, they are ugly, they’re destructive, they cause chaos to all sorts of people, they don’t produce the results I want. Just like Michal, it doesn’t produce the fruit I want, just barrenness; it doesn’t produce life. I have to give my heart to him fully, trusting that he will keep it safe. It’s a process!
This is not to bring condemnation or shame but to highlight something that Holy Spirit may want to put his finger on to bring freedom, healing of our hearts, lightness of being, rest to our souls.
Holy Spirit, don’t let me stockpile this issue of disappointment, boxing it away and not deal with it. Let me engage with it regularly so that it doesn’t poison my heart.
I am passionate about the issue of sorting our hearts out because they can contaminate who we are in God, what comes out of our mouths, all of our living and moving and having our being in him but we never go digging. Sorting things out has to be Holy Spirit led otherwise we will unravel ourselves into a heap! When he exposes, it brings life. It’s quick and easy, no condemnation, no judgment, there’s freedom, and there’s release. It feels different when he does it rather than me constantly trying to fix myself.
This issue of disappointment creates a doorway, an access point for the enemy. It makes us vulnerable to lies, and then as he has a habit of repeating the same lies, and it builds a structure in our hearts, in our thinking, that needs dismantling.
So when he reveals something, some moment of disappointment, what do we do? Ask him:
What is the lie that I am believing?
Then go through the process of repenting, breaking agreement with the lie, renouncing it. Receive forgiveness for agreeing with the lie. Ask him what the truth is. Pause long enough to not just ask for forgiveness but actually receive it, (I speak it out loud). Feel the shift, feel the weight coming off.
One of the things that causes us the most disappointment is often ourself. We feel like a failure as a Christian, as a spouse, a parent, a son, a daughter, whatever. And we can find evidence that backs up the lies!
Go through the process in Psalm 142 of “pouring out your complaint”. Tell him the disappointments, don’t airbrush it. David in the psalms did not airbrush anything!
Let’s be real with God. Let’s not pretend. Putting on the religious face, pretending everything is fine is one of the ways we have tried to deal with disappointment. It doesn’t work. We still poison the atmosphere with what is in our hearts, it is still there on the inside despite the ‘plastic face’. We have to deal with the heart as he leads us. Maybe start with this prayer, from Psalm 139:23-24. He will show you.
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
As we give the process to him to lead and as he decontaminates our hearts, removes seeds of distrust, removes disappointment, and restores joy and expectation, let hope arise!
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