Samantha Keller: That’s Dennis Rainey. Here’s his wife, Barbara.

Barbara Rainey: that’s why we experience disappointment with God, because we, as his children, have expectations of him that may or may not be accurate, just like we have expectations of people that may or may not be accurate. So we expect God to act in certain ways because of specific verses we’ve read or because of stories we’ve heard someone else tell or share, and so we think that’s how God acts. Our disappointment comes because we don’t really know him. We are expecting something of him that may or may not be true.

Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we’re dedicated to helping you experience God in your home.

MUSIC

Samantha: This is part one of a five-part series on how we deal with disappointment with God. This episode is available to everyone, and parts 2 through 5 are for anyone who subscribes to Barbara’s Friends and Family.

Here’s Dennis to kick things off.

Body Clips:

Dennis: Barbara, sweetheart, welcome back to the broadcast.

Barbara: Thank you, Dear.

Dennis: I can’t help but refer to it as a broadcast. Too many years in a studio.

Barbara: Yeah, I know.

Dennis: You’re working on a book on being disappointed with God. You began that book by talking about when you had just turned thirteen years of age and you experienced a major disappointment with God.

Barbara: I did, and I actually used that as the intro in my book. I have to say this about my book as we start into this: the book is one of these never-ending projects. I started it probably three or four years ago and it’s nowhere near completion, but I’m enjoying it. I’m learning a lot as I write and this first story that I start with is when I had just turned thirteen. My parents had announced that they were going to have a baby, which when you are a teenager, that’s embarrassing. You just kind of go, “That’s weird.”

Yet, I was excited about it because I had brothers and I thought, “This is finally my chance to have a sister.” So I began praying, and I prayed and prayed and prayed that God would give me a baby sister. I’ll never forget the morning—early in the morning before the sun had come up—my dad came into my room. My brothers were sleeping in my room with me because my parents had gone to the hospital to have this baby. And he came in and I sat up so eagerly in my bed and he looked at me and said, “You have a baby brother.” And I went, “Uhhhhh…seriously?” And my head went back against the headboard and I said, “Ouch.”

Dennis: I’m sorry for laughing.

Barbara: Yeah, I know. And I just remember thinking, “Oh, that’s so terrible.” Because I had prayed, and I remember thinking, “What did I do wrong?” and, “Why didn’t God answer my prayer?” and of course, it was a very short-lived disappointment because a few days later when they came home and brought my baby brother and they let me hold him, I was in love with him and spent hours and hours and hours with him all those years before I went off to college. I just thought he was the greatest thing in the world. I still adore my baby brother.

So, you know, there are disappointments in life that are short-lived, but then there are other disappointments in life that last and last and last and last. Dealing with disappointment is not an easy hurdle for any of us, no matter what kind of disappointment it is. That story is just one kind of disappointment, but there are lots of other kinds of disappointment that we all deal with. I’m realizing the more that I work on this that it all goes back to how we view God. It all goes back to what we think of him and to our relationship with him.

Dennis: You know, disappointment is a part of life and until you started working on this book, I don’t know that I spent much time kind of analyzing and slicing and dicing it to understand what’s behind it. Why don’t you explain the conclusion you’ve come to about what the core is about disappointment.

Barbara: Well, I think after working on this for a long time that the real essence of disappointment goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It goes back to Adam and Eve and their decision to do life on their own. They listened to the voice of the enemy who said, “Has God said?” And I think, at its core, their decision was one of comparison. They compared their lot in life with what they assumed God had and they felt like they had gotten the short end of the stick. They felt like God had given them less than he could have or should have. And they rebelled against that. So, when that happened, it changed everything.

I think all of our disappointment in life stems from that one decision, because now we are subject to failure and blame casting and we can’t keep our promises and there are a million reasons why disappointment exists in the world. I think it all goes back to that moment when Adam and Eve turned their backs on God and walked away from him. The world was changed forever because now we know loss, and I think all disappointment is associated with loss of some kind and there’s a connection between the two. Adam and Eve lost their innocence; they lost their relationship with God and we’ve been disappointed ever since.

Dennis: You’re talking about loss, I think what you’re hinting at is the expectation of something that we long for. Adam and Eve did that in the garden, and we do that today with God in our prayer life. We do that with our spouses and our children, and experience disappointment with them because we long for something—maybe it’s specific, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just that we’re longing to be fulfilled by these people and that doesn’t always work out. That loss results in disappointment.

Barbara: Exactly. Well said. Would you like to help me write my book?

Dennis: No, but I’ll coach you! I’ll add some thoughts for you.

Barbara: Maybe I’ll quote you.

Dennis: You helped me write a few of ours, so maybe I’ll help you a little bit.

Barbara: That’s true.

Dennis: You’ve had other disappointments in life. Name one that you’ve had with me. This is a question I was looking forward to asking you. Early in our marriage, what was something that occurred that resulted in disappointment with this new husband—this knight in shining armor that I was at the time? I mean, my goodness! A specimen!

Barbara: Yeah, well I remember it very well, and I know you do too. But it was only a couple of months into our marriage when I realized that you were not leading the two of us spiritually the way I had envisioned. I had read lots of Elisabeth Elliot books, I had read lots of other missionary stories, and I thought that the way a husband or a father led his wife and children was you sat down and basically had a little church service in your house. You read a scripture; you prayed together. I don’t know what I expected, but I had this image because of all these stories I had read about other people.

I didn’t grow up in a home like that. I grew up in a home where we did not talk about God at home at all. I think we prayed over some of our meals—I don’t know that we prayed over all of our meals. We did go to church every single Sunday. But God was not a subject of our conversation. We did not talk about him in our everyday lives and I wanted that in my new family, in my new relationship with you. I wanted us to talk about Jesus. I wanted us to do Bible study together. I just thought that was the way it needed to be. That wasn’t happening, was it?

Dennis: Nope, it wasn’t. And here’s the thing—you demonstrated how to handle disappointment with another person by sharing that disappointment with me in a way that I could hear it. You didn’t pick up a club and go, “You wretched, sinful, new husband—straighten up and lead us spiritually.” No, you invited me to be the leader of the family. At that point, honestly, I didn’t know what that looked like. I think a lot of men don’t know what it looks like.

Barbara: Yeah, that’s part of the issue with disappointment is that we expect things of people they may not have a clue to know how to do. You know, I remember in that situation, the first thing that I did is I just began to pray and ask God—first I began to pray and ask God to change you because I thought is was just a matter of God waving a magic wand over you and you would automatically become this spiritual giant that I was expecting you to be even though we were only 23 and 24 years old. That was another misplaced expectation I had—that we were more mature and wiser than we were at the time. But after I prayed about it for a while I realized that it was not something that God was going to do—at least he wasn’t going to do it quickly anyway. So I quit praying about it and I’m not sure what I said to you. That part I don’t remember. But I must have said something because you said I did. Do you remember what I said?

Dennis: I think you just shared your heart that you were struggling with being disappointed with me as a spiritual leader of our family. I wanted to be that. Again, I didn’t know what it looked like. I needed training; I needed coaching; I needed a mentor. I’ve now had a few of those over the years so I know a better way to go about solving that problem.

Barbara: Well, I also learned through that situation that everybody is not the same. Every spiritual leader does not look the same, act the same, have the same gifts. I realized that what I was expecting of you was not who you were in your personality and in your makeup. So a lot of our disappointments in life with other people are because we are expecting them to be someone who they are not or expecting them to behave or perform in ways they are not trained or skilled, or it’s not in their personality to do so.

Dennis: People handle that kind of disappointment in different ways, and I think you handled it in a very mature way by coming to me. Others, however, can handle it by denying their expectations or thinking all they’ve got to do is lower their expectations. I ran across this quote by someone who said this: “I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.” Well, I just want to point out that a relationship, whether it’s with God or with your spouse or with a child or a friend or a parent, every relationship lives off of expectations. If you have no expectations, that relationship is dead.

Barbara: Correct. And that’s why we experience disappointment with God, because we, as his children, have expectations of him that may or may not be accurate, just like we have expectations of people that may or may not be accurate. So we expect God to act in certain ways because of specific verses we’ve read or because of stories we’ve heard someone else tell or share, and so we think that’s how God acts. Our disappointment comes because we don’t really know him. We are expecting something of him that may or may not be true.

Dennis: I think you’re on target there. I think another area where disappointment occurs is unanswered prayer.

Barbara: For sure.

Dennis: I remember early in our marriage, we prayed for a family member who was going through a hard time. God said, “No,” to answering that prayer—so both you and I struggled with praying for a time because we felt like—well, it wasn’t that God wasn’t trustworthy—but it was like, “Can we really count on him or not?”

Barbara: Well, it’s like he has his own agenda. From our perspective, our desires seem to line up with what he would want or what we know of him, and when it doesn't happen it leaves us as believers feeling like, “Does this even really matter? Does it even really work?” I’ve got a quote by J.I. Packer that I just love. He does not use the word disappointment.

Dennis: J.I. Packer is an Englishman, theologian, great writer…

Barbara: Wrote tons of books, most of them I haven’t read because they are so deep and heavy. But anyway, he says this: “We suffer deeply because we have received what we did not want, or we are left wanting what we will not get.” I think the word disappointment can be substituted there. We are disappointed deeply because we received what we did not want, or we did not receive what we wanted. That’s why I think loss and disappointment are almost synonymous. I think we are missing it so much with God. We’re so clueless as to who he is. We think we know who he is, but we’re just clueless. I mean, he is so much more than we can possibly imagine. He’s a mystery and he’s beyond comprehension and finding out, and yet we continue to try to figure him out and put him in some kind of a box or in some kind of a formula that makes sense to us because we’re trying to figure out this relationship. But it's not the kind of relationship we will ever figure out. So, therefore, we’re often disappointed. And it’s not because he wants to disappoint us or because he enjoys that, it’s because we misunderstand him and we misunderstand what he’s doing. It hurts and we suffer a lot because of it.

Dennis: Yes, no doubt about it. I’ve been looking forward to asking you this question: What would you say characterizes the person who is disappointed with God?

Barbara: Oh, I think all kinds of things. I think it’s, as you said earlier, I think it’s evidence of a relationship that’s hurting. When we’re disappointed with God I think we’re depressed, I think we’re hurt, I think we’re suffering, I think we’re confused, maybe lonely, maybe lost, I think we’re bewildered—it’s another word I’ve used a lot because I think back to the disciples and how they just could not get their heads around what Jesus was up to. They were constantly baffled by what he would do or not do. They expected something else. They expected him to become king at that time. I mean, they thought the kingdom was coming any day and he was going to sit on a throne and rule and squash the enemies. That wasn’t his plan, and they never could grasp it until after the resurrection they started making sense of it. So why would we expect that we would see God differently? We’re still baffled by what he’s doing. We’re still confused by his timing and his plans and so I think we are often left in a puddle because we can’t understand what God’s up to.

Dennis: I think the person who lives in a state of disappointment, especially with God, begins to lose hope.

Barbara: That’s the real temptation—to lose hope and give up on God and the relationship.

Dennis: You stop living for him, stop reading the Bible and don’t believe what he said. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a great statement. He said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

Barbara: That’s a great one.

Dennis: It really is, because the way you don’t lose infinite hope is to believe the truth about God. Don’t get deceived into believing a lie that he’s not a loving God, that he’s not sovereignly in control. You may not understand what he’s doing in your life, a loved one’s life, but you’re really left with, “Who are you going to believe and who are you going to trust?” I think the bottom line is to trust God and to take those unanswered prayers, those doubts, those disappointments to the Lord and say, “Here I am. You know who I am. I’m trying to find out who you are in this broken place called the world. Help me know how to believe.”

Barbara: I just listened to a podcast by Philip Yancey the other day. Philip Yancey wrote a book decades ago that I read and it was really life changing for me. The title of the book was, Disappointed with God. I’m not sure what the title of my book is going to be even though I’m writing about that same topic, but he was speaking on this podcast and at one point in the conversation, he said, “We have two choices. We can either trust God or we can trust everything else.” He said, “I choose to respect and trust God even though I don’t understand what he’s doing and even though it doesn’t make sense. Life is hard and he doesn’t make sense, but I would rather trust him and believe in him than trust and believe in what my eyes can see and what’s in the world, because I know that’s hollow. I know that’s empty. I know that’s going to fail me. But even though I don’t understand what God’s doing, I’d rather put my hope in him.”

Samantha: What a great perspective! Dennis and Barbara will be right back to close this episode in prayer. There are four more in this series on Disappointment with God. They’re available to subscribers of Barbara’s Friends and Family. If you’d like to sign up and hear the rest of this series, along with other perks available to subscribers, you can do that when you go to BarbaraRainey.substack.com.

And now, here are Dennis and Barbara.
Dennis: I want to come back and talk on the next podcast about how we get out of this ditch if we find ourselves in a deep ditch of having lost hope in God and being very disappointed with him. But we’ve got some listeners right now who are, frankly, in that ditch. They just need somebody to pray for them. Would you pray for them right now?

Barbara: Yeah. Oh Lord God, you know I have a friend in a ditch like this right now and it’s a hard place to be. I’ve been there and I know what that feels like. Father, I want to pray that you would give those who need it courage to keep on believing. The temptation is to quit believing. That’s what Satan wants us to do. He wants us to turn our backs on you and say, “I’ve had enough, God, and I’m walking away.” But you don’t want us to. You long for us to stay near you because you see the end, you see what’s on the other side, you see what’s down the road. Just as Jesus saw what was ahead when he went to the cross. And so I pray for courage for those who are listening who need it. I pray for determination to hang on tight no matter what and faith to believe that in time they will see more clearly once again. Thank you that you love us. Thank you that you allow us to go into these hard places because you want to reveal yourself to us and you want us to know you as you are and not as we think you are and not as we pretend you to be. In Jesus name, amen.

Samantha: The Barbara Rainey Podcast is a production of Ever Thine Home.