The Mountain Top to a Cave, Dealing with Disappointment

I have felt disappointed with God this year. Bubbles burst and outcomes I longed for didn’t happen. That all too familiar ache in my heart surfaced that God owed me, or I deserved something different because of my Bible-based, God-honoring process. I had prayed in bold faith. I wanted what God wanted. I had done all the things.

A counselor asked where I saw God in this one particularly painful conversation. I came up blank. I had felt like He wasn’t there. I felt abandoned, felt He let me down. Where I was once praying big things in faith, I found myself now contending with God over how these prayed over things had turned out. So no, God wasn’t there in my mind even though I knew theologically He was.

My disappointment began to change forms, quickly turning into discouragement. Demotivating me to do what I knew I was right, or what I was called to in the parts of my world that needed tending. I developed skeptical feelings about process and outcome. I falsely rehearsed that living with hopeful expectation just leads to disappointment. It was hard to not be disappointed. I felt like I gave my whole life for this cause, and it wasn’t working. Then Covid-19 hit and turned the world upside down, but in my world a lot of things were right-sided. God, as He does, started a new thing, in His way. He always does.

I am reminded of the prophet Elijah and his struggle with disappointment. He has this literal incredible mountain top experience witnessing fire come down from heaven in a display of authoritative power. Elijah had tremendous faith and strength to follow through on the hard things that God asked him to do. He just finished some seemingly impossible things in the name of the Lord, and witnessed God show up for him. However, Elijah’s hopes and dreams for Isreal aren’t realized. The evil queen doesn’t repent. His assumptions were wrong. His idea of a victorious God was not what Elijah encountered after his run to the palace. Instead, he still finds a hard-hearted queen, and so a fearful and disappointed Elijah flees to the wilderness. Alone, worn out and upset, he wants to die. 1 Kings 19:4 tells his feelings.

"He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. 'I have had enough, Lord,' he said. 'Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.'”   

Here’s where disappointment and God intersect in Elijah’s story v.11-12

"The Lord said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.'Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 'What are you doing here?'"

The Lord then says, in his gentle voice, “What are you doing here?” At the bush God ministered to Elijah giving him time to rest, grieve, restore, but now it’s time to send Elijah back out. He didn’t leave Elijah in the same condition He found him. He provides a physical restoration and a helper. He had plans for Elijah; plans that Elijah hadn’t known. Elijah only saw what made sense to him. His disappointment clouded his trust.

Like Elijah sitting under that broom bush and then in a cave, I had to sit through my own personal earthquake, storm, and fire to be able to hear His still small voice. I needed to leave the cave standing firm against my disappointment. He whispered, I was there, Pamela, I am always with you. The act of simply reinserting God back into that conversation and hearing the conversation through His filter of love, freed my mind from the isolated prison cell I was in.

Husbands, children, health, jobs, dreams, friendships will fail. I will fail. As I encounter feelings of disappointment I must rehearse what is true about God. He is faithful, trustable, unchanging, and sovereign. Never leaving or forsaking me. Meeting me in the bushes and caves I hide under. These disappointments are the very place where my faith begins to be strengthened. Wait the storm out, His voice will be there.

“Faith is often strengthened right at the place of disappointment”

Rodney McBride