Sudden endings and disappointments

It's a weird feeling when something comes to a sudden and unexpected end. At its worst, it can crash upon you with a sense of debilitating grief - like when a pregnant woman has a miscarriage, or a family member suddenly dies of a terminal illness, or a previously fit person becomes paralysed in a traffic or sports accident. At the milder end of the scale, it can leave you with a sense of disappointment - like when the electricity cuts off just before the climax of that movie or football match on TV, or when your dreamed-of trip to Niagara Falls becomes a wash-out because the rain or fog prevents you from being able to see the fabled landmark.

We're only in the second week of July, but already this month has had two "sudden endings" that brought disappointments with them for me.

One of those sudden endings was our ministry decision to postpone the Leadership Development Course that we had been planning to run here in southern Spain this autumn. Hundreds of hours have been invested over the past two years, communicating with the participants and staff, registering the course with the university, negotiating with the self-catering apartments that we'd be using for delegate accommodation.... and then, suddenly, we had to make the hard decision to postpone the course till next year - because of factors caused by the ongoing coronavirus situation around the world. What a sense of loss and disappointment that ministry decision brought with it.

Then, only a week later, another sudden ending crashed upon me: literally crashed, when a bizarre accident left my little car overturned at the side of the road. The day had started out with a lovely, peaceful walk in the forest, an opportunity to enjoy God's creation in the cool morning hours. But on the way home, when I'd only driven a few hundred yards and was travelling at a mere 6 kph, something seemed to malfunction as we went around the bend. A few seconds later, we had crashed into large rocks at the edge of the road, and my car had flipped over on its side.

I am so thankful to God for his protection: that the slow pace and the quiet road meant I emerged from the wreck relatively unscathed. But it brings many sudden endings with it: not only a sudden end to our pleasant morning outing, but probably an end to all the other outings (for swimming or hiking) that I might have done over the summer weeks, and very probably an end to the car itself... as I suspect that the cost of repairing it will probably be more than the market value of the car. (It's thirteen years old.) These bring their own sense of disappointment.

Encountering disappointments is a normal part of life and learning how to navigate them well and rise above them is a life skill that we need to be developing from our childhood years. If not, life's disappointments, especially the ones that come upon us suddenly, can derail us and rob us of all the good that the future holds for us. We've probably all met people who never seemed able to move beyond that divorce or bereavement, that loss of a job or end of a relationship... 

Learning to find our comfort and strength in God is crucially important at such times. I wrote about that a few years ago on this blog, in a series of three posts about what to do in a crisis, I reflected on David's response in a time of great loss. You can find those posts by clicking here.

But this morning, I was reflecting on a different way of avoiding disappointments - not the kind of disappointments that are thrust upon us by life's circumstances or by other people, but the kind that we can inadvertently cause for ourselves or for God. Read on in the post below to consider one way that we can minimise feelings of disappointment and regret.