Disappointment

"If it wasn't for disappointment, I wouldn't have any appointments."

So sing They Might Be Giants (in the song "Ana Ng", I think). TMBG's ability to brighten my college all-nighters makes it possible for me to overlook their glaring grammar mistake. Yet, the sentiment is one I understand.

As an over-achieving perfectionist (I don't mean that as self-promotion, just fact), I am prone to constant disappointment. It's not all as bad as TMBG sang, but the mere fact that I pulled out their misuse of the subjective gets to the heart of the matter. Few things live up to my standards. And that's not so bad when the things we are talking about are the grammar in quirky pop songs or a hair cut or the cleanliness of my house. The real problem is when the "things" that disappoint me are people.

The truth is that there is probably no one I have known who has not, at some point in time, disappointed me. And while there certainly have been times when my disappointment was reasonable, much more often the disappointments were self-induced. Frankly, when you expect perfection, no one will ever measure up; not even yourself. Especially not yourself.

"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," Paul writes. And how. I see it clearly. I'd be glad to point out to you the ways in which you have fallen short of my expectations, to say nothing of the glory of God. And as well as I can point out your short-fallings, I assure you that I can also point out my own, in vivid, but mostly boring, detail. But while I can get caught in the deep valley of disappointment, Paul does not. He writes, "since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are justified by God's grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus."

The good news is that God is not disappointed in us. Oh, God has plenty of reason to be disappointed. No matter how over-achieving we might be, we know that we can never measure up to God's standards. We know that we could never justify ourselves in God's sight. And yet still God loves us with a full and life-giving love, a love that has been proven to us in Jesus Christ. God frees us from all those things that disappoint us about ourselves. To paraphrase another pop song, God loves us just the way we are. Just the way we are. And that, my friends, is grace. And this grace frees us; it frees us from the power of disappointment. It frees us to give grace to one another. It frees us to accept that we are loved, that we are lovable. Just the way we are. Through Christ we have an daily appointment with God's unconditional love.

And that love never disappoints.