What God Is Showing Me Through My Disappointment

For a long time, Psalm 37:4 has been somewhat of a life verse for me.
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
It was so simple: grow up in God and He’ll show you what you really want. Though I had been raised in the church, I had also seen the rebellion in my heart manifest itself in my sometimes terrible life choices, mainly with choosing guys to date. At 24, I felt like I was finally understanding what it meant to mature in Christ and the process of sanctification was more clearly at work than ever before. In 2013, when I was 27, I entered into what felt like my first Christian relationship. I thought my desire for marriage would finally become a reality the longer we dated. After all, my desire to be with a Christian man was good.
But there I was two and a half years later, scrambling around my condo, trying to gather everything that was his and transferring them to a pile on my dining table: a sketchbook, his books, a mug, a harmonica, DVDs, even all the cards and notes I had kept from him. That winter afternoon in January 2016, I was sobbing desperately with indignation. Five minutes after getting off the phone with a man I had spent the last couple of years believing I would marry, I realized — he dumped me. J and I never lived together, but by the the summer of 2015, I had moved back to San Francisco from Texas, lent my condo to him, and was living at home with my parents. In our time together, marriage had always been on the table. Because we had been planning to begin life here the following year, he had left a remnant of his possessions upon returning to Texas for the school-year. When he suddenly broke up with me(angrily, and over Skype), I didn’t get much of a reason, other than that he was depressed and couldn’t handle being in a relationship. He left me with the responsibility of processing alone, along with several boxes worth of his belongings. I was at a complete loss as to what I would do with his things and even more lost on how our nearly three-year relationship had vanished in a day. I felt like God had let me down and I didn’t understand why.
All I could do was replay our entire relationship in the days that followed, ruminating on what might or might not have gone wrong. I would torment myself looking at old letters, pictures, and conversations we had in the past; remembering old memories and milestones in our relationship. It was as if I was trying to push out the pain and any memory of him so this might go away sooner. Or that he might telepathically feel my pain and realize he’d made a mistake. But that day never came. I tried to follow up with him to see what parts of our friendship could be salvaged, only to discover instead his preference for the company of a college girl, flirtation with a married woman, and late nights out drinking. As I fell deeper into a downward spiral learning about this new stranger, I realized that I was not only grieving the loss of a relationship but the loss of an entire person who I once knew and treasured. In the months that followed one of the most overwhelmingly traumatic experiences of my life, I struggled greatly with the perceived injustice of experiencing all this without knowing that he had felt some equal or greater portion of that same pain. I was also often confused about whether I had made another terrible mistake in letting this man into my life. Where had we gone wrong? And what did I do to deserve this rejection and neglect from someone I thought would never hurt me?
Friends have reminded me that “time will help to heal.” Although they are right, writing this all out eight months after the fact doesn’t diminish the pain and significance of it all. Only, the betrayal I felt then has shifted: from a deep place of regret to a means for God to work out my faith. I have been given a lasting picture of what Joseph meant when he said “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). God was absolutely not absent in any of it. When I was frantically running around my condo in tears and trying to figure a way out of my own misery, God was right there offering to give me rest(Matt 11:28). Whenever I doubted His love and care for me, he would give me these words:
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; GREAT is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22)
He has never been more active in showing his love for me than He has through these last few months. For every injustice and hurt I felt during this break-up, he has restored friendships, renewed passions, and stirred up new ideas to pursue.
We are all broken people, so our relationships will always remain broken on some level. Our more difficult emotions (sadness, regret, anger, longing, frustration) should all point us to a better picture of relationships that God intended when He created us in the garden. We were never meant to experience this brokenness that resulted from the Fall. We were never meant to become familiar with betrayal. We were never meant to embrace break-up, divorce, or death. Something is wrong, and that’s what our feelings remind us of when we find ourselves seemingly hopeless. But He has used my suffering to show me that life on this side of heaven was never meant to satisfy– marriage, family, relationships, and even the Church will never fulfill me in the ways I want them to. He is better, and that is what gets me through the grind of living in this city, my temporary home.
I have described the disappointment of this break-up as most similar to grieving the death of a loved one, and in many ways I have learned the goodness of laying to rest my dreams with one person in order to trust God with His plan for my life. I wrote this all out to remind myself that heartache is very real; it pierces deeply and leaves a scar. So I don’t want to forget it. Learning to grieve well has been so important to me in this season. But as God grows me through the trials of life, I hope I will discover more and more that He alone is my true joy — that He is the only One who will never let go of me(Matt 28:20); and He loves me so much(John 3:16, Ephesians 2:4-5). Knowing this, I don’t have to fear any disappointment of that promise ever being broken(Romans 8:36-37). By His grace, I will wake up tomorrow ready to receive more of what only He can give — Himself.