When God Disappoints

Over the past decade, since making my covenant of willing devotion in my Christianity to walk a walk of submission to God in trust of His sovereignty and good will, I have had a great journey of growth and promotion. It has also however been a rocky and roadblock filled journey that has needed a couple of breakthroughs and has offered numerous life building and character forming lessons through the perseverance and endurance I have had to have. On the morning of 1st March 2012 however, after a couple of months of enduring a tough series of spiritual, physical, financial and social-relational beatings I arrived to a morning of great despair and disappointment in God that I had never ever experienced before. I had signed up for a walk that promised those beatings and I had endured a couple of them over the last decade but now I was tired of all that business. I was tired of this business of growth through adversity that would build me up for the crown of responsibility and blessing that God had planned out for me to enjoy and be a part of. I knew that Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, Ezekiel, Paul and the whole lot of comrades in God had gone through quite a lot of stuff in their day as part of their glorious walk in God but I had had enough. I could not take any more; my body, my mind and my spirit were tired. Beyond my fatigue I also felt let down by God, and every inch of my body cried out to God (or anyone that could hear)… I am hard-pressed and considerably crushed, I am perplexed and despairing, I am persecuted and I believe abandoned, I am struck down and feel destruction closing in. I questioned the beautiful purpose in a season of constant suffering watching others prosper as you learn something special about God and about life. I didn’t want to be God’s handiwork for object lessons nor did I want to wait any longer for greatness and promises to arrive. I questioned the point at which He needed to come and renew my strength. Could He not appreciate that I was at the point where God in the book of Isaiah when promising relief declared that even young men would get to the place where they had lost endurance? How much more waiting upon Him did He need from me before delivering me? That morning as I considered my station in life; my failures and fatigue as a leader, husband, father and entrepreneur I found myself privately struggling with the biblically incorrect concept of a “disappointing” God. A disappointing and absent God…..for my LORD, my ABBA was distant from me. His face and His hand of help were hidden from me. I knew that He is alive and watching over me….but He was hiding, He was rejecting, abandoning and deserting me. I found myself bearing up a lament almost like Job’s recorded in the book of Job, chapter 19 (paraphrased); God, my Lord and my friend, has put roadblocks in the path that I take. He has prevented my progress; I cannot prosper. My every effort is covered in darkness, I cannot succeed and His blessing is gone from me. God has stripped me of my honor and removed the crown from my head. I can no longer stand comfortably among my peers; they think I am now a spent force. They look at me as a failed man, one to whom they speak to words of encouragement only because it is good to do so yet they mean them at all. God is engaged in tearing me down on every side till I am gone. He has diminished my hope; I am crushed because He is crushing me, breaking me down, grinding me to dust. God is angry with me. His anger burns hard against me and He appears to be counting me among His enemies. Every side I turn, He seems to be fighting me, surrounding me with war. Surrounding me with an army I cannot defeat or overcome. My friends and all those people who used to visit me or seek me out for business and investment deals are now hiding from me. Every time I approach them, they find a reason to dodge me and they do not want me to visit them; they always become suddenly busy when I ask to drop by. My friends do not want to lend me or give me any money; they have forgotten how useful I used to be to them. My workers scorn me. They no longer respect me and I almost have to beg them to do what I want them to do. They look at me as a spent force, a man whose time is up, an employer with nothing much to offer anymore except the opportunity for a transit job on the way to something stable and worthy to be called work. When I speak at Church or say anything about the Lord, I can tell that people hear but no longer listen or consider my words with seriousness. They look at me and wonder how I can speak such words which apparently are to no effect in my own life. How can I talk of a faithful, strong and mighty God who cannot deliver me from my own troubles or rescue me from certain impending doom? I felt that my way had been troubled to the point that I found myself in doubt of the words in Psalm 1 which state that; blessed is the man who considers the LORD in his walk; whose walk is blameless, keeping far away from the counsel of the wicked, or the way of sinful and unrighteous men and avoiding the seat of the prideful and loud mouthed smart thinking but empty minded men. For I believe I have kept the way of the LORD and yet my path is not blessed. Where was the LORD? The LORD, Jehovah Shammah and Shalom, who had carried me into the new year with the promise of Isaiah 60; “Standup and look up with confidence, Your God, Your great redeemer whom no one and nothing can successfully oppose has come to your aid. His light is shinning upon you. Even though there is a great darkness presently over you and greater darkness is surely coming over the peoples of the earth, for you, child, be confident and do not be afraid. That darkness will not affect you for you will live in the light of the Almighty. Your God will be your light and will cause you to prosper. He will keep you safe and strong.” The year was fast running by and the darkness was closing in much more day by day. When was this promised light coming? How much more darkness was needed before I could experience light? Why was I being allowed to have pain as I meditated and considered these words and those in scriptures like Hebrews 13 verse 5? “I (your loving God and dear father) will never ever leave you. I will never ever consider abandoning you and neither will I ever forsake you. You can consistently count on me (Jehovah Shammah)” Hebrews 13:5 Never abandon me? Never forsake me? ...I couldn’t describe where I was or what I felt as anything but abandonment. I was disappointed with God ….I felt solidly let down. Where was God? When would He come from behind the mountain? Why was His face hidden from me?