The Invitation of Disappointment

Beloved Church,

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in a Sustaining Women in Ministry Cohort out in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. It was four sweet days with fellow female ministers and few obligations. It is a minor miracle for a young mother to have a few days without children AND without having to do the dishes or lead anything. I arrived optimistically knowing that our leader for the time was a spiritual director, but little else. If you've ever been on a women’s retreat, or a church retreat, you know the drill. These sorts of things usually center around some wonderful, lovely and optimistic topic like joy, or love, or something equally delightful. 

So you can understand my surprise when our leader pulled up the title slide on the screen, and we all read: The Invitation of Disappointment. 

That didn't sound delightful. More of like a bummer. Dwelling on disappointment did not sound so lovely and optimistic, and worth putting my life and work on pause. Sitting in that conference room halfway across the country, I questioned if contemplating my personal disappointments in life could be soul filling. So much of my spiritual upbringing was more of the stiff upper lip variety,  accepting the sadnesses as God given trials, or only looking to the joys of Christ. 

But this is an important recurring theme for our spiritual lives. It is simply impossible to live to any age in life and not experience disappointments. We all bear wounds. So what if the offer from God is an invitation instead to experience the healing and wholeness of God in our lives? 

If you were present last night at Wednesday night church, Ethan taught on the Spirituality of Weakness. The path in which faith leads us through the difficult moments of life to come out the other side in the culmination of love. It comes from the progression found in 2 Peter 1:5-9, describing a life of faith that grows in hard earned ways of walking with God through the hard moments of life. 

2 Peter 1:5-9 ⁵For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; ⁶and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; ⁷and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. ⁸For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁹But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins.

How timely it was for Ethan to teach on this last night, because all week I couldn't get this passage out of my head. I was struck this week how much of an overlap there is in the posture of embracing our disappointments and our weaknesses and giving them to God. 

Dear church, there is much in this world that calls us to want more, to want a spirituality of power, for we do serve a God who is all powerful. But the call of Christ is to walk the “road less traveled”, to bravely (or even reluctantly) adopt a Spirituality of Weakness in which we walk with Jesus through each step of this path. Because it is only when we are weak, when we embrace the cross that we can be transformed. Through that long and painful journey, through bearing our disappointments in Christ, we find healing and wholeness. 

So maybe, the next time you are disappointed to find yourself facing something frustrating, revisit the spirituality of weakness. Revisit 2 Peter 1:5-9, and prayerfully consider where you are on that list of qualities, and where God might be calling you into. Take a look around and see- what is God inviting you into? And through that road, our disappointments shift from becoming a wound we bear to an invitation to bring us to ground. 

My friends, my prayer for all of us these days, is that we experience the love of Christ in our most joyful and in our most disappointing of days. 

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Caitlin