Written by: Ed Chinn

Narrated by: Kara Lea Kennedy

In the early fifties, my parents and a few other young couples came together to form a new Pentecostal church in Pratt, Kansas. They bought an old one-room school building and moved it onto a corner lot in Pratt. Then Dad led the way through the design, renovation, excavation, and construction phases.

When finished, we had suitable space for meetings, Sunday School, and a basement-level home for a pastor and family. My parents loved joining with others to help bring that church to reality. They poured themselves out for a dream, a call. And they did it with joy for a quarter century.

The End of the Road

But that golden season of church life came to a stop in the late 70s. I saw it when our family drove from our Texas home up to Pratt to spend a weekend with my parents. At some point during that weekend, Dad and I parked in front of that little church building and talked of the old days.

Then Dad opened his pickup door, “Okay, now I want to show you something.”

I followed him up the front steps. Dad pulled a tape measure from his overalls pocket and stretched it across the door. As he gazed at the tape, he kept shaking his head.

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

“A casket won’t fit through this door.”

The words delivered a gut punch to the old way I had seen my dad. He was now a man facing retirement and regrets, feeling the sand suck away from his feet as the tide went out. My heart broke to think of him driving to the mortuary, asking to see caskets, and measuring them as he slowly realized none would fit through the church’s narrow door.

I saw how disappointment entered his heart space. No sonic boom, just a slow-motion disintegration of a dream. This was serious. He and Mom had given so much. That place that had fostered the lives of farmers, ranchers, young families, the elderly, and other community members could not host a final celebration of those lives. The finish line had to be moved somewhere else. What did it all mean now? I watched as Dad asked one of life’s hardest questions.

Dis-appointed

Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) breaks “disappoint” down to “dis-appoint.” [1] A better job or home may have been “appointed,” but when it collided with facts, it was “dis-appointed.” Evicted, rejected, defeated.

Disappointment doesn’t mean we calculated selfishly or foolishly. Sometimes it just reminds us that we are not the authors of life. We do our best, but our strength is limited; our vision is partial. In our incompleteness, we make choices, announce plans, and fill our calendars. Then life erases those “dates with destiny.”

But perhaps what we lost wasn’t real life, but our small views of it. We’ve all heard—even from our own lips—that embarrassing, sometimes tragic phrase, “But I thought...”

Disappointment can come to us as a gift, toppling small, unworthy, or lethal dreams. For example, it seems my biggest disappointments have involved damaged or dead relationships. But I can also see that if some of them had come to the result I preferred, I would not have met my Joanne ... or our kids or grandkids.

My parents eventually came to the same place. After walking through the narrow places of preferences, severances, and measuring doors, they walked into a larger faith, wider vision, and unexpected grace notes.

Life has a way of taking us beyond suffocating constrictions into the panorama of a new landscape.

[1] Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language (Foundation for American Christian Education, San Francisco, CA, 1828)

The Timberline Letter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit timberlineletter.substack.com/subscribe