7. Are we disappointed with God when we suffer?

So what then is the alternative - disappointment WITHOUT God? We would not want that!

Even though he were yet dead?” John 11:25. Even though your brother is dead? “Believeth thou this?” And Martha did believe. So even in terrible disappointment we are assured that relief will occur in some form.

The Bible never belittles disappointment. There are chapters of disappointment in Job, on anguish and despair and plenty of arguments. There is only one chapter on restoration in Job, “Then Job answered …” (42). The Psalms are full of how to deal with suffering and the hurts of our enemy, those who torture and revile and torment and threaten, telling lies about us. Each message sends us back to God and His ways, to heal our disappointment with Him.

What needs to be known is that what we feel now, will not continue. It will gradually be replaced by a more peaceful outlook on the situation. If God is your friend you cannot struggle with God. Jacob could not struggle with the angel, who left him with a shuffling limp, a clicky hip, a shortened sinew, and a damaged sciatic nerve and arthritis. What would Jacob prefer? Surely he chose to bear the pain, and be reminded of a wrestle with God, than to be relieved of the pain, and forget Him. Paul, with his thorn in the flesh learned that it was best to bear it as a message from God, about dependence, and not to struggle any more for the healing of the thorn.

Our disappointment is in itself a sign that we hunger for something better, and whatever our suffering situation and disappointment with the outcome, that we will in time regain a better outlook. As we ache for something better, we long for a sign from God. In the absence of a sign/message from God, our faith and our hope are the longings for the end of the journey. We know that ”he will wipe our eyes of tears”, and that “our flesh will see God”, no more mourning, no more death, no crying, no pain, no more fear and no more disappointment then, but what about now? The great promise is that we will see it all with our own eyes in future. So now we must do the mourning, and the tears and enduring the fear and pain and the disappointment?

2 Corinthians 1:3-7 (NIV), “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble, with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm because we know that just as you share in our sufferings so also you share in our comfort.

The worry and the fret of what is left, together with the thinking that no good can ever come, makes the terrible disappointment seem overwhelming. However none of us should ever risk rejection though, because God’s disappointment with us would be catastrophic and with His rejection of us, we will be far worse off. We may never know the purpose of our suffering, but we can rest assured that God has a purpose. So if we can come to terms with loss and trauma and tragedy, or forgiving the unforgivable, and even asking for blessings upon evil ones, we are well equipped. It is the demonstration of God’s mercy and His love and His compassion. In that, we are expressing His grace which we learned from Him. The subject of forgiveness is not expanded here, but dealt with more fully in “Forgiveness and Reconciliation” by the same author.

To rectify injustice, instead of continuing in angst over the evil, it often means that we go down a dark and complex path, coming to terms with our loss of character, or a loss of physical or mental ability. Then at the end of that path, God will transform us into a true child of His, where we will, like Him, embrace and extend forgiveness. With our good fruit we will remember not the evil and the evil one. This is how God wins the evil men, for it is their redemption also, when they seek it.