Disappointment with God

I think of my relationship with God as a wave. Full of ups and downs, but somehow there is a magnetic force that holds me to Him. In all likelihood, He just will not let me go.

Psalm 139 was one of the first things I read as a young Christian and its verses still resonate with me. "Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?" Over the years, God has proven to be my safe harbour amidst life's tempest (ooh more maritime metaphors :)).

One of the most common "downers" in our Christian walk is disappointment. It could be a knockout blow like the breakdown of a relationship or the death of a loved one. But it could also start from something small, which festers and then grows into a raging monster.

Recently I went through a mini "cold war" with God that lasted for about three weeks. In a nutshell, the issue was this: When I first came to Beijing, a Christian friend leapt at the chance to introduce me to her cell group. And so I went along and thought it was good, but then two weeks later, this friend suddenly told me she and her husband were moving to Shanghai. I continued attending the group, alone, but felt increasingly adrift and remote from its members. A month ago, I started going to a different cell group with a newfound Christian friend. Things looked promising. But suddenly, this friend told me she was getting married and would very likely not be in Beijing for much longer. And so I was left to brave the group of mainly Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers alone.

As this problem nagged, it grew, dragging out other skeletons in my emotional closet. I went through the motions of going to service and cell group but inside I felt cold. Then, one day while online with a friend, I started talking about the situation and suddenly, my own sinfulness stared me squarely in the face in its stark entirety.

Confronting disappointment with God basically involves the realisation that the problem is not God, nor indeed other people. The problem is me myself and I. But no well-intentioned friend can singlehandedly make you see that; this realisation is like the drop of a small yet staggering weight in the dense solitary sea of one's consciousness.

People fight such disappointment with God in different ways. Some choose to focus their energies on serving others, as He decreed, to take their minds of their own problems. But as Neonangel rightly pointed out, there is nothing worse to God than serving Martha-like with a simmering heart of resentment. Others just withdraw from Christian activities all together.

As with all things, the way forward is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. And having a friend pray for you definitely helps, when your disenchanted self cannot heave the words out of your mouth.

For those of us in the "friend" position: We are called to help our brothers, but though the good book tells us that "whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 5:20), such a prayer partnership is no mere theological haranguing session. The book of Job is an object lesson in empathy and we as Christians must pray for that in order to avoid sliding into empty gestures of self-righteousness.

At the end of the day, the ultimate question is: What is the purpose of this life? If "all the world is a stage, and the men and women merely players", to quote those famous lines from Hamlet, who then is our audience? I agree with Spottiswoode that amidst the travails of life, one just needs to take a deep breath and *focus*.

Here again, Job is another object lesson. We ain't the ones in control here. "Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air. Death and destruction say, 'Only a rumour of it has reached our ears.' God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells..." (28:20-23)