It was late, and I was lying in bed telling my husband the truth in a way that probably sounded more like falling apart than faith.
I was tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. The kind that settles into the part of you that has been barely holding on for a long time.
For most of my life, I believed fear was the biggest giant you face in the hard seasons.
But in this season of my life I am learning that disappointment is its own kind of beast I find myself face to face with more than once. It’s not uncertainty that is dangerous here. It is unwillingness.
Fear is what rises when you don’t know whether God will come through. Disappointment on the other hand, is what settles in after you have been faithful, and things still did not turn out the way you believed they would.
Here is what I am slowly understanding about disappointment.
It is rarely about the circumstance itself. It is about the distance between what is, and the story I was telling myself about how it was supposed to go.
So much of what we call a hard season is really the grief of an expectation that didn’t come true. We thought it would look different by now. We thought obedience would move faster. We thought that if we did our part, the math would work out the way we planned.
And when it doesn’t, disappointment has a way of showing us what we were quietly holding onto. Not the obvious things. The ones underneath.
When I let mine show me, I found two I had not wanted to look at. My need to be significant. My need to be excellent. The version of me who delivered at a high level and knew exactly what she was good at. I have been so tempted to pick all of it back up and build my own way out,
simply because I know how.
I keep thinking about David.
He was anointed as a boy, maybe seventeen, and then he waited almost twenty years before he ever sat on the throne he was promised. Twenty years of being shaped in the in-between. Tested in his focus, his devotion, his patience.
And somewhere in the middle of that long wait, while he was being hunted by a king who wanted him dead, he walked into a cave and found that very king alone and unguarded. It was the perfect moment. He had the skill to end it. He had every reason to reach out and take, by force, the thing God had already promised him.
He didn’t.
He chose to wait instead. Not because he lacked the ability, but because he trusted the timing more than he trusted his own hands.
I have read that story so many times. I am only now understanding what it costs to live it. To have the gift to force the outcome, and to lay the gift down anyway. To believe that the moment you receive a promise is not always the moment it is meant to be fulfilled.
I fell asleep in all of that honesty.
And when I woke up, the only thing on my mind was a passage I could not have quoted to you. Psalm 4. A chapter I had not read in a long time, and certainly hadn’t memorized.
Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness. You have given me relief when I was in distress.
And then, a few lines down, the words I think He woke me to find.
But know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself.
I went and looked at what that word meant. Godly. And it undid me a little. In the original language, the word is woven together with the word for steadfast love. So the ones who are set apart are not the impressive ones, or the qualified ones, or the ones with everything finally figured out.
They are simply the ones who have answered His love.
That is what being set apart actually means. Not chosen for how well we perform. Chosen, and kept, by affection.
You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.
In the waiting, in the disappointment, in the gap between what I hoped for and what is, I am handed the same small choice every single day.
I can keep responding to my circumstances. To the uncertainty. To the giant in front of me.
Or I can respond to His love.
Believe me, even now I am not writing this from the other side of it.
I still do not know how long this season lasts. I am learning these things in real time, the same as you.
But here is what is becoming true for me.
Effort, I am finding, doesn’t move a season. Presence does. The striving I am so good at was never going to shift it. Relationship, or an even better word, intimacy will.
And maybe that is the gentlest mercy of all of it. That before He ever forms the voice you are meant to carry, He takes the time to form your mind. Your heart. The parts of you no one claps for.
The very thing I have been trying to rush past, the not-yet, the unanswered, the uncomfortable in-between, may be the exact place I am being made.
So if you are somewhere in your own waiting, doing the faithful thing and aching at the same time, I want you to know I’m there too. And this episode is for you.
P.S This week’s podcast is actually a snippet of week 3 of our Set Apart Speaker Bible Study happening LIVE every Tuesday and it’s not too late to join. You can join us live, or catch all the replays by signing up here.
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