Plans and Puffins

Behold the noble Puffin...

I was sitting with a group of ladies when I heard my phone ring.  Picking it up, I plugged my left ear and said, "Hello?"  There was quite a bit of swearing going on the other end of the line.  Swearing and yelling to be more specific, so I thought it would be wise to move outside with my phone before one of the tender homeschooling mama’s I was sitting beside heard what my friend was suggesting her ex-husband do with his new motorbike.  “Hold on babe,” I muttered.  “Let me go outside so we can chat better.”  Truth was we were nowhere near chatting.  My friend had a lot more poison to get out of her soul before chatting would be possible.  I walked out the door into a well-timed gust of wet. It was cold and grey, a Northwest fall special.  The rain was falling heavily and splashing up from the pavement in order to soak my feet twice and the wind was blowing the whole mess sideways.  I headed for an alcove and waited for a break in the storm, figuratively speaking.  

“Yes, I know. No, I’m not.  No, you didn’t.  No, you shouldn’t…”  A running list of affirmations and directives fell from my mouth as I tried to keep pace with the crescendo of disappointment I was hearing.  I practiced deep breathing in order to keep my blood pressure down, my dear friend was really letting loose and I realized that something had upset her deeply, this was more than an unfortunate incident, this was a wounded heart.  

We talked.  I shivered. We talked some more.  Finally, the crux of the issue became clear, “I spent so much time... snup... days, years, to have things end like this…why did I even bother?  Snup! Where did God go?  I’m not even sure I heard him in the first place. Snup! Snup!”
“Umm….Seriously, are you hiccuping right now?  Did you just cry until you have the hiccups?”
“Snup!” My friend said some rude words while crying and hiccuping some more.  

“I was tracking with you, until the hiccuping.  Then I got distracted.  Do you need to hold your breath?  Can I go inside now?  You can’t hiccup and yell at the same time can you?”  I like to believe I exhibit a strong balance of compassion and practicality. As it turns out, my friend was not finished hiccuping or venting and we talked for a while longer.  Disappointment with God figured heavily in the conversation.  

I got off the phone 20 minutes later feeling blue.  Letting the wind propel me, I walked the parking lot while I prayerfully handed the entire incident back over to the Creator.  One of the best spiritual disciplines I was taught was to spend time after difficult conversations in prayer.   Processing disappointment with God is hard work and I have found it helpful to spend time acknowledging my inadequacy in front of the one who created both puffins and accountants.  The former being something strange I really like, a swimming bird, and the latter being something I really appreciate, a human who likes math, yet want to stay far away from. 

While I acknowledge that disappointment has made me more compassionate, I still dislike the experience.  Disappointment is defined as the feeling of sadness or displeasure caused by the nonfulfillment of one's hopes or expectations.  My biggest problem in dealing with disappointment is that I need to acknowledge that life isn’t about me.  It is amazing how often I want the world to cater to my expectations.  Equally as staggering is the amount of times the world refuses to play along.  It’s rough.

At the center of it all lays the issue of faith.  Am I able, when life deviates far from what I expect, when it causes unbearable suffering, to process the disappointment honestly with my faith intact?  I confess I found that difficult when I was my own highest authority.  Without a creator, we cease to have purpose or meaning beyond ourselves.  Puffins are a weird bird that decided one day it would be great to go swimming and accountants have a lot to answer for in choosing that whole math thing.  

So I’m thinking about you if you are processing disappointment.  If you are one of the many, who look at your life and wonder if there is a way forward after failure, or if you are simply tired because so much of the journey seems to tilt uphill.  I pray that you might come to know Jesus listens carefully to those whose prayers go unanswered.  That although your well-crafted plans have come to naught, His plans for your eternal good, so different from your own, are moving forward, fashioned in his faithfulness.

Praying for all of us this week,

xoxKaren