Disappointment

I imagine we all have suffered this sometimes-crippling emotion. We anticipate something or long for it, or dream of it, put our time and energy into investing to make it happen, and for whatever reasons, it just doesn't happen. Johnny was supposed to call Sylvia back and he didn't do so. The boss told me he was going to give me a raise, and that never eventuated. Millicent promised her neighbor Maurice she would watch his plants and water and care for them while he was away on holiday, and she forgot. Several of the plants died. As a result, Sylvia, and I and Maurice all experienced disappointment. 

Psychology Today said in 2012 after love and regret it's the 3rd most commonly experienced emotion. According to the old adage, “disappointment is expectation divided by reality.” I visited the PT website to find some significant advice and some well-worn chronology to the emotion and consequences of disappointment. And I was not disappointed.  The trail is wide and the content well worth the read. It's endless, as well, which could be wearying for the casual wanderer into such a journey. Start here. Especially read this one by blogger Melanie Greenberg. 

For instance, Jim Taylor (teaches at USF, Ph.D.) writes "Disappointment is a normal, though difficult, part of growing up. Your children will inevitably experience disappointment in school, sports, the arts, and in their social lives. How your children learn to respond to disappointment will determine its impact on their future achievement and happiness." 

I really liked that comment. Watching my own kids fail at times, or remembering when I failed as a child, and now as an adult, when I fail again, what I do with that failure and the commensurate emotion of disappointment will impact what happens next and certainly how I feel about what happens next.

Both Beverly Flaxington and DW Rainey (Rainey, D. W., Larsen, J., & Yost, J. H. (2009). Disappointment theory and disappointment among baseball fans. Journal of Sport Behavior, 32(3), ) comment on longevity of disappoinments helping people to handle them. They both use sports imagery. And indicate that a losing team, which always loses, doesn't disappoint long-time fans. Why? The fans are used to losing. Obviously then their expectations are lowered, and when they lose the Big Game, a shrug of the shoulders is common rather than tearing one's hair out. 

What prompted my thinking about this topic today? Perhaps it's the loss of the Kansas University Jayhawks to the West Virginia Mountaineers. After all WVU had started the conference season at 0 and 5, meaning their fans were getting used to losing, having lost all five of their matches against Big 12 opponents. And perhaps because Kansas is a perennial winner of the conference championships, and I'm an alumnus of this hallowed basketball icon. 

Losses happen; no team ever finshes the season without a loss. But my expectations were so high on today's game, with a Hall of Fame coach in Bill Self, and some pretty good players on the court, well, it just seemed a good time to win another road game. But I felt disappointed when the Jayhawks lost. 

What else prompted my thinking about this topic today? I'm worried about the Kansas City Chiefs dropping teh ball like the Jayhawks did. It is their first time in the Conference championship game (vs the New England Patriots) in deccades. Expectations are high; worries join them. Will the Chiefs perform well in the cold and snow? Will the offense catch those passes from phenom Patrick Mahomes? Will the defnese show up like they did last week against the Indianapolis Colts? Time and ESPN here in Sydney will tell. 

What else? I suppose my own personal commitments to serve people and particularly to love my wife and children are often met with disappointments. I let them down. I plan to take out the rubbish, or to bring in the laundry, or help put away the dishes, but sometimes I forget, or the phone rings and I drop the ball.

The words of the Prayer Book (Anglican) remind me, "we have gone our own way, not loving you as we ought, nor loving our neighbors as ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed and in what we have failed to do." Weekly to pray this might most make anyone feel disappointed, but if you know yourself and your own sinful tendency, this regular confession of sin is actually a disappointment-preventative. I know myself. I know I will not perform perfectly. I know I will disappoint others. I know God knows who I am and He appreciates my confessing my sins, and my failures and I can again hear clear words of pardon and hope in what comes next.

Perhaps the studies of Flaxington and Rainey should help me understand myself. Not to excuse me, nor to cause me to stop trying to be better, but to forgive my failures that much quicker. And to forgive the Jayhawks or the Kansas City Royals or whoever. 

PT's advice is 6 strategies when you are disappointed:

"1. Revise expectations: Try a bit of “retroactive pessimism.” Social psychologists have identified what they call a “hindsight bias” in which you can limit their disappointment by revising the high expectations you once had for winning. Tell yourself you didn’t really expect to win, and as time goes by, the new memory will replace the painful, original memory.

2. Increase your disappointment tolerance. There’s no reason that people low in disappointment tolerance have to remain that way forever. Don’t let disappointment breed pessimism because if you do, you’re likely to set yourself up for even more disappointment in the future.

3. Don’t let disappointment skew economic decisions. When feeling disappointed, a person is more likely to sell at a loss. If your favorite sports team lost the championship, don’t rush to dump your treasure chest full of memorabilia onto eBay.

4. Assess a person’s role in personal disappointments. People can control many of the outcomes in their personal lives. If someone’s expectations in love and work chronically fail to materialize, make an honest appraisal of what needs to be changed.

5. Control identification with a losing cause. The sports fans who feel the most let down are the ones who identify most strongly with their teams. There’s nothing wrong with being loyal, but if it impairs a person’s daily happiness, he or she needs to find other ways to boost their spirits.

6. Use humor to boost the disappointment emotion. Loyal sports fans who retain their loyalty despite years of disappointing outcomes almost seem to relish their identification with the underdog. Perhaps by joining the ranks of fellow sufferers, a person can find solace in self-deprecating humor. Laughter is truly one of the best coping strategies for dealing with disappointments, and offsets the consequences of faulty pessimism-based decisions."

Consider this from the Gospel of John, "But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men, and because He did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man." (2.24-25)

I suppose this was a preventative Yeshua used in relation to humanity. After all, in just a couple more years He would be dobbed in to the governmental leaders and crucified for crimes He didn't commit. Was He disappointed? Nope; He knew both His mission and humanity's natural responses.

My hope for you in 2019, set goals, sure. Set standards of behavior and love and morality and activities. And set up a way to forgive yourself if you don't reach or maintain those standards. Hurdles on a cinder track make for a great addition to a race, and falling on those hurdles slows a runner down, sometimes to the point of loss. And losses can be disappointing, .So, put into your life hands that lift you up after you hit the hurdles. Yeshua is the most obvious choice. His forgiveness is eternal and life-changing. And He won't disappoint!

Romans 5:5. "hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us."

Is there really hope?

Mention the words Columbine or Colorado Springs, Sandy Hook, Port Arthur, Paris' Bataclan Theatre, and 9-11 and immediately images of terror and pain, mass murder and head-shaking fill your mind. The world is bad and getting worse. When the G-20 gathers, when Congress or Parliament in Australia or the UK conduct talks and seek answers, most thinking people simply wish them well, but doubt any real substantive changes will occur. Where is there hope?

Last summer I stood in Amsterdam, in the shelter/ home of Anne Frank. If anyone knows daily fear and chronicled it well enough to become the journalist of the new world, it was this mature teenager. She wrote in her diary, “Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.” Hope gives life, to be sure, and real hope is even deeper. But in light of recent and continuing terror, I ponder the question, "Is there such a thing as false hope?"

William Ruddick writes in Bioethics, Vol. 13, #3-4, 1999, in his abstract of his piece Hope and Deception: "Convinced of hope's therapeutic benefits, physicians routinely support patients' false hopes, often with family collusion and vague, euphemistic diagnoses and prognoses, if not overt lies. Bioethicists charge them with paternalistic violations of Patient Autonomy." He begins his essay with Ambroise Paré's maxim, "Always give the patient hope, even when death seems at hand." (XVI)

Bildad, a friend of Job the ancient in the bible said these words, "Can the papyrus grow up without a marsh? Can the rushes grow without water? While it is still green and not cut down, yet it withers before any other plant. So are the paths of all who forget God; and the hope of the godless will perish, whose confidence is fragile, and whose trust a spider’s web. He trusts in his house, but it does not stand; he holds fast to it, but it does not endure. He thrives before the sun, and his shoots spread out over his garden. His roots wrap around a rock pile, he grasps a house of stones. If he is removed from his place, then it will deny him, saying, ‘I never saw you.’ (Chapter 8.11-18)

Bildad is saying that there is such a thing as false hope. Planting roots of a plant in a rock garden will cause disappointment. So he says, 'the hope of the godless will perish.' What if my hope in education or in government or in a new candidate for government is misplaced? What if my hope is false hope? Where can I turn?

Many of us have been disappointed. We have placed our hope in people and things and they have failed us. The dashing of our hope has caused deep disappointment and the pain of our disappointment has filled us with the fear of being hurt again. That fear has held us back from entering new relationships as freely as we once could. Once burned-twice shy, as the saying goes.

Job says that the hope of the godless fails. He is talking about godless hope-a hope that excludes God and makes us dependent on the things and people of this world for our core fulfillment. This kind of hope often fails because it requires others to be what they don’t have the resources to be – the answer to our need for a relationship with God. In contrast, hope that doesn’t disappoint is centered first in God because it knows that no one can be faithful in a way that God is faithful. No one can love as God can love us. God alone is fully dependable. God alone will not let us down.

Hope is most real when it is based on what we know about someone. It is most dangerous when it is based on unrealistic expectations because that sets us up for another failure.

That's why this picture is so powerful to me.

It's the picture of someone from above a pool, reaching to rescue someone drowning. The actual story which inspired this painting is in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 14. In that chapter of the Bible, Yeshua is seen walking on water. Then Peter is looking around and says, “Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.” And Yeshua said, “Come!” And Peter got out of the boat, and walked on the water and came toward Yeshua." Wow, that would have been thrilling. And exhilarating and full of glory! "But seeing the wind, Peter became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately Yeshua stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

This story is real to me just now. The Bible makes it clear that God wants to be in relationship with us, not only those who never have heard of Him, or who go from sinner to saint in a prayer. He wants to be in relationship with us who have walked with Him for decades. Each of us fails. Each of us is still walking in feet of clay. God's hand is not so short that it cannot save us. (Isaiah 59.2) Our sins separate us from Him, but His hand is ever reaching to get us out of the troubles in which we find ourselves. Hope "does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." (Romans 5.5)

This is for believers AND for unbelievers. This is for those who are new to the faith and those who are long involved. Hope does not disappoint. Thanks be to God!