How to handle, what to do about disappointments is such a difficult lesson to learn. Some of the reasons for the difficulty rest in the fact that disappointment is imbued with feelings. You can never eliminate your feelings when dealing with disappointment. And perhaps that was the most significant learning for me. I’m not much of a wallow-er but it is important to accept the feelings you are feeling. Without acknowledging them they will continue to rule and you will find you are at their mercy, regardless of how rational you believe you are.
In accepting that you are experiencing some emotions allows you to develop your way of responding to and dealing with them. I’ve heard, as many Christians have, that the reason for our disappointment is that the Lord has something better for us. That may be true but in the midst of the fact of the disappointment, who, what, why doesn’t always play a primary role. And it really is our emotions that need to be considered and dealt with before we can move into responding proactively to the disappointment.
Disappointments can lead us to giving up or lead us into new thinkings. It is incredibly important to assess the disappointment in terms of what it’s telling us before we move into responding. I do believe, however, that some of my more ‘profound’ understandings of (fill in the blank) occurred as I faced, not always gracefully, what the disappointment was telling me. But once I moved beyond my initial reaction and started considering what happened, and why, then invariably I can develop a more positive response.
Sometimes we become disappointed when a project we are working on doesn’t seems to be turning out as we had thought. People are another source of disappointment, especially in how they react to (fill in the blank), but perhaps the ultimate disappointment occurs when we feel this toward ourselves and our behavior. Lessons can be learned from disappointment. And how we choose to behave in these situations, because they seem to be inevitable, is very telling about our character and how we develop it. Disappointment is an ‘is’. Our lessons depend on our attitude.
