Dealing with Disappointment | Part 3

Disappointment is directional. When you don’t handle disappointment in a healthy way, the fear of disappointment will cause you to give up before you even try.  You have to bring your disappointments to the Lord in prayer.  
 
Missed expectations in life are often the best directions in life; because they drive us to our knees and into the arms of the Savior.
 
David sought the Lord’s insight in 1 Samuel 30:7-8, “Then he said to Abiathar the priest, “Bring me the ephod!” So Abiathar brought it. Then David asked the Lord, “Should I chase after this band of raiders? Will I catch them?” And the Lord told him, “Yes, go after them. You will surely recover everything that was taken from you!”
 
God uses our disappointments to steer us in a better direction and teach us important life lessons. Without some disappointments in life, we would never learn what not to do.
 
I was talking to an elderly lady in church one day and she told me about how her grandparents came over to this country from England without anything and they worked hard and built a great life for their family.
 
But she told me that it almost didn’t happen. The couple had just gotten married and they had saved up a lot of money for their honeymoon cruise but her grandmother became very sick, so they had to miss their trip on a luxurious ocean vessel.  
 
They were so sad and they couldn’t get a refund for their trip so they lost all that money.  They were truly devastated.
 
The name of that ship was the Titanic. And with tears in her eyes, this elderly lady told me how grateful she was that the Lord caused her grandmother to become ill or else they would have never come to America and she would have never been born.
 
1 Samuel 30:16-20, “And they found the Amalekites spread out across the fields, eating and drinking and dancing with joy because of the vast amount of plunder they had taken from the Philistines and the land of Judah. David and his men rushed in among them and slaughtered them throughout that night and the entire next day until evening. None of the Amalekites escaped except 400 young men who fled on camels.”
 
When life throws you a stumbling block to knock you down; you just need to use it as a stepping-stone to climb to a higher level.
 
The quicker you can deal with disappointment, the happier you will be.  When we experience disappointing consequences, it could be God’s way of exposing things that don’t belong in our life. Pain gets our attention even more than pleasure.
 
Proverbs 24:16 tells us, “For though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again.”
 
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This blog post was written by Pastor John Raymond of New Horizon Church in Slidell, Louisiana.