It’s our vacation week, and so, of course, The B99 and I both picked this week to start some new books.
Her book? Building A Resilient Life: How Adversity Awakens Strength, Hope, and Meaning, by Rebekah Lyons.
Mine? YouTube Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Following and Making Money as a Video Influencer, by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis.
It won’t surprise you that the quote I’m going to share comes from the first one. But hang on to the end for a surprising insight from the second.
One of the things that I love about having a best friend who reads is when she asks if she can read me a quote. I love quotes. I am all about some quotes. I also love the way her voice inflects as she reads it to me, as if she hadn’t read it to herself already, and she’s hearing it for the first time.
But this quote? This one was way longer than I expected, and it wrapped itself around me and wouldn’t let me go. Some quotes I hear or read, but this one? I felt this one. It comes from a book by Douglas McKelvey called Every Moment Holy, Volume 1. The book is full of liturgies to pray in specific situations, and this one is called “For The Death of a Dream.”
Drink it in slowly. These words are weighty, rich, and full of glory.
O Christ, in whom the final fulfillment of all hope is held and secure, I bring to you now the weathered fragments of my former dreams, the rent patches of hopes worn thin, the shards of some shattered image of life as I once thought it would be.
What I so wanted has not come to pass, I invested my hopes in desires that returned only sorrow and frustration. Those dreams, like glimmering faerie feasts, could not sustain me, and in my head I know that you are sovereign even over this– over my tears, my confusion, and my disappointment.
But I still feel, in this moment, as if I have been abandoned, as if you do not care that these hopes have collapsed to rubble.
And yet I know this is not so.
You are the sovereign of my sorrow. You apprehended a wider sweep with wiser eyes than mine. My history hears the fingerprints of grace. You were always faithful, though I could not always trace quick evidence of your presence in my pain, yet did you remain at work, lurking in the wings, sifting all my splinterings for bright embers that might be breathed into more eternal dreams.
I have seen so oft in retrospect, how you had not neglected me, but had, with a master’s care, flared my desire like silver in a crucible to burn away some lesser longing, and bring about your better vision.
So let me remain tender now, to how you would teach me. My disappointments reveal so much about my own agenda for my life, and the ways I quietly demand that it should play out: free of conflict, free of pain, free of want.
My dreams are all so small. Your bigger purpose has always been for my greatest good, that I would day-to-day be fashioned into a more fit vessel for the indwelling of your Spirit, and molded into a more compassionate emissary of your coming Kingdom.
And you, in love, will use all means to shape my heart into those perfect forms. So let this disappointment do its work. My truest hopes have never failed, they have merely been buried beneath the shoveled muck of disillusion, or encased in a carapace of self-serving desire. It is only false hopes that are brittle, shattering like shells of thin glass, to reveal the diamond hardness of the unshakeable eternal hopes within.
So shake and shatter all that hinder my growth, O God. Unmask all false hopes, that my one true hope might shine out unclouded and undimmed. So let me be tutored by this new disappointment. Let me listen to its holy whisper, that I may release at last these lesser dreams. That I might embrace the better dreams you dream for me, and for your people, and for your kingdom, and for your creation.
Let me join myself to these, investing all hope in the one hope that will never come undone or betray those who place their trust in it. Teach me to hope, O Lord, always and only in you.
You are the King of my collapse. You answer not what I demand, but what I do not even know what to ask. Now take this dream, this husk, this chaff of my desire, and give it back reformed and remade according to your better vision, or do not give it back at all.
Here in the ruins of my wrecked expectation, let me make this confession:
Not my dreams, O Lord, not my dreams, but yours, be done.
Amen.
What makes that prayer resonate so powerfully? The common experience of disappointment. All of us get disappointed, but it’s what we do in those moments that either leads us to the solid rock of healing or the quicksand of hopelessness. (Or the Pit of Despair for my savvy readers)
Did you catch the choice McKelvey made? “So let this disappointment do its work.” He chose to acknowledge two very real things: the pain of his situation, and the perspective of his God. Life on its own will lead all of us to the door of disappointment, and that’s undoubtedly where the enemy of our soul wants us to stay.
I realized this when I read a surprising stat found right in the middle of page 34 in a book about YouTube. Did you know that YouTube viewers watch over one billion hours of videos every single day?
Every day, y’all. And while the book I’m reading is going to use that stat to motivate people to monetize their content, I was struck by something much simpler and much more profound:
That’s a lot of searching.
YouTubers don’t binge; they search. They look for how-to videos and why videos; for videos that answer specific questions.
I think all of us are searching for meaning in the madness, for purpose in the pain, and for something deeper in the disappointment, and I believe that those searches can all ultimately lead us to The Truth, even if they take us through some crazy places first.
Why do I write, post, and create so much content about how having real faith in a real God helps us overcome real struggles? Because eventually, all of us come to the door of disappointment, but I want to use every platform God gives me until I die to encourage people to walk through it because on the other side of that door is the purpose and the plan that brings perspective to the pain.
“So let this disappointment do its work.”
Selah.
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash
