How do I find hope in the face of unfulfilled desires and disappointment?

Some of my most painful journeys as a Christian have been the chapters of life when I had to bear the weight of disappointment of unfulfilled desires, how unrelenting and heavy that heartache felt, the ways it confused me about God and his timing and his purposes, his goodness and his promises. The day’s desperation felt like it was met with his silence. Whether it be desires for our personal lives or more broadly—the desire for marriage, to conceive, for a broken relationship to be restored, to see non-believing family members come to faith, to see children or loved ones pursuing destructive paths to come back, to see people we love who are sick, to be healed—the desire for change, for improvement, for sought-for clarity, healing, relief, restoration for us, those we love, our churches, our communities. There’s a way in which something that seems so obviously good that there are seasons where it’s just not happening.

What can I really say to this that would do justice to some of your experiences with this? There’s definitely nothing I can say to erase the pain and confusion and to fix it all. I guess one of the realities that come with disappointment is that there are no shortcuts and there are no platitudes. Sometimes these hard chapters of our lives need to be walked out, lived through, one day, one moment at a time. These last few years, I’ve been so struck by the stories of Scripture, the reality that I can read in one sitting a story that actually played out over decades. I meet Abram for the first time in Genesis 12, and Isaac is born by Genesis 21. It’s not like things are all better and neat and tidy by then either. More is coming. That being said, Abraham and Sarah waiting for God to fulfill his promise for a child, it’s told in nine chapters of Scripture, but it was twenty-something years of life lived. Life lived in waiting, in confusion, in wrestling, and promises not being fulfilled, flailing in faith, taking matters into their own hands, and questions of, How is God going to make this work out? It’s not just them, though. It’s Joseph. It’s the Israelites enslaved in Egypt for over four hundred years. It’s four decades of wandering in the wilderness, and on and on it goes in Scripture. We get to see how their stories end in one sitting, and we get to see the part when it comes together of, Oh yes, God is faithful. But that’s not how they lived it, and that’s not how we live our own lives of disappointment, either. I guess the hope there is, if there’s any rush or pressure to have it all figured out and have it feel neat and tidy now, maybe it’s okay that you don’t.

Maybe the hope is that you’re not alone in it and that this is part of what it means that our lives are lived in stories that are still unfolding. It’s okay that our lives of unfulfilled desires and disappointments feel more like they’re located in Genesis 16 rather than Genesis 21 today, that we’re in the part of the story where so much feels perplexing, increasingly lost or hopeless, broken, or irredeemable, not able to turn around for the better. It’s so often in the context of time past, life lived, things seen in hindsight, the accumulated moments of feeble endurance and limping faith, that the chapters unfold and we see and understand more clearly than we did before. Ask me in some of my deepest seasons of disappointment what God was up to, and I would have no answer for you. And perhaps if I were even more honest in that moment, I may have even said he doesn’t seem to be up to anything. He seems to hate me. Ask me now and I can tell you so much of how God broke me to rebuild me; how much he wanted to teach me his love through the love of other people who are companions and patient with me while I was in process, when what I learned in the past was to not rely on others and to figure it out myself; how much he wanted to show me that even when I wasn’t strong enough to hold onto him, he held onto me; how much it was good for him to do things his way, rather than my way, to save me from myself in ways I didn’t even know I needed saving. There are no shortcuts to that, though, and I know there are some stories many of you are living that truly will not make sense until you see Christ face-to-face.

The hope is that this is a story, that there is an Author, and that the Author happens to be someone who knows what he’s doing, is purposeful, is this promised and precious combination of wise and good. And he’s an Author who has already given us the end of the story in Christ, that somehow we end up in a place where there are no more tears, no more sadness, no more mourning in ways that are utterly unimaginable to us now in this current chapter of our story.

There are so many more things that could be said, but for those of you who are struggling to find hope in the unfulfilled desires and the disappointment of your life, I will simply say, take heart, dear brother and sister. I know this is hard and confusing. This isn’t the end of the story. We will wait on him together. And if I could close by sharing a poem that some of you may already be familiar with by William Cowper, God moves in a mysterious way.

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines,
Of never-failing skill.
He treasures up his bright designs
And works his sov’reign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace.
Behind a browning providence
He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain.
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.