Wrestling with Disappointment and Finding Hope in God’s Faithfulness

This summer wasn’t at all like I expected it to be.

I had big plans for this summer.

I was going to finish my sci-fi/fantasy/adventure book. (I wrote one chapter.)

I was going to participate in “Writing with Jeeves and Wooster” through The Habit. (I attended one lecture and did none of the writing exercises.)

I was going to see all the friends I didn’t get to see very often during the school year. (I saw one friend twice.)

I was going to spend every moment I could with the kids, soaking up the family time like a sponge in a wading pool. (I ended getting distracted by my iPad and impatient with myself.)

And now I find myself here, at the end of the summer, desperately trying to redeem all the time I ‘wasted’ doing things that I hadn’t planned on doing, and not doing the things I had planned on doing. The above list makes me sad. It’s a gravestone to all my expectations, sitting lonely in a forgotten part of the cemetery. I could try to make myself feel better by planting some daisies to brighten up the forgotten corner, but that would just be sugar-coating something that I must consider instead of trying to conceal.

As an adult, I feel like I still wrestle with how to resolve feeling disappointed in myself. My inclincation is to plant the daisies–to try to turn something dark and brooding into something light and airy and cheerful with just one simple act or attitude adjustment. Rather than work through my feelings, I choose to hide them away. I know they’ll come out eventually in ways that I don’t expect, but that won’t happen for a while, and until then I’ll feel okay. I have to remind myself that working through feelings doesn’t mean hiding them, it means bringing them out into the open and talking through them with somebody, like untangling a mass of knotted yarn pull-by-pull instead of just stuffing the yarn into the craft bin under layers of unused fabric. I might be able to forget about the yarn for a while, but if I want to use it to make a dishcloth, I have to fish it out and untangle it sometime.

Why do I feel disappointed with myself? Asking myself this question is a great place to start unraveling. I read this quote from Annie Dillard recently in a discussion thread on The Habit: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I tend to like quotes that have a wide application–this quote is no exception. You can put any amount of time into the quote and it still works well:

How we spend our seconds is how we spend our minutes.

How we spend our minutes is how we spend our hours.

How we spend our hours is how we spend our days.

And finally, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I think the answer to my above question is that I feel disappointed in myself because I started off the summer with a list of goals that reached to the stars and beyond, but I didn’t have a plan about how to climb up to the sky. I thought I could achieve my goals by willing myself to achieve them. I believed that because I would have so much extra time over the summer, I would somehow fill that time with exactly what I wanted to with little to no effort whatsoever. Oh my. We used to joke at the coffee shop I worked at that the slowest nights are the nights where our closing tasks take the longest. We think we have loads of time, so we take things slow, and then by the end of the night we realize we have loads of work left to do. Somehow, having more customers means we got more closing tasks done quicker.

This summer, I learned, or rather re-learned, that meeting goals takes careful, intentional planning. And, despite the fact that I didn’t accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, God is faithful. He ordained my every move. His will is perfect and his timing is perfect, and he’s using my feelings of disappointment in myself, and my resolution of those feelings, to draw me closer to himself and to make me more like Christ. Philippians 3:12-16 says,

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

To end this post, here is a list of all the things I did accomplish this summer, praise the Lord:

I attended most of the office hours (via Zoom) offered by The Habit. I like the casual environment of office hours–writers, just talking about writing, encouraging one another.

I had some excellent discussions with other writer friends about how to world-build and set up chapters, or scenes, within a book. I now feel better prepared to write a book.

I recorded a batch of videos that someday, when I’m feeling brave, I will post on YouTube as a means to share my music with family, friends, and my students. The audio recordings I’ve been posting are nice, but watching someone play an instrument is much more fun.

I wrote down all the songs I’ve written on the ukulele and put them in a binder in alphabetical order so that I can easily find them. Most of them I was either playing from memory or from scribbles in my notebooks.

I participated in a young women’s Bible study at church.

I attended ‘park day’ with the young women from church on most Friday mornings.

I spent extra time with the kids, and also my sister, my parents, and my husband. Kelsey and I spent many Sunday afternoons bumming around Target with the kids, Brian and I played badminton after the kids went to bed, and we had family time up at the cabin with G-ma G and G-pa P.

I’m thankful for all these summer moments, even though they looked different than I thought they would, and Lord willing I look forward to writing down, planning, and then completing my goals for next summer, all to the glory of God!

Photo: Did you know sweet potato plants produced flowers? I had no idea.