When there are some particularly share-worthy posts that I read during the week, I save them for Sunday and do a couple shout outs – like…
This post, The Ministry of Disappointment by Amena Brown Owen. Here’s my favorite line: Then I grew up. I learned the painful way that sometimes, even when we pray and ask… Read More
I wish things in my life had been different.
By different, I guess I mean easier and less disappointing.
I wish my one set of grandparents hadn’t rejected my family when I was in elementary school. I wish my other grandmother, the good one, wouldn’t have died so early from lung cancer. And I wish I wasn’t the one to find my good grandfather, hours after his heart attack, dead on the floor in his house.
I wish my younger brother wouldn’t have left home when he did. I wish we had a better relationship.
I wish my sister’s husband wouldn’t have cheated on her. I wish he would have been a good husband and father. And I wish they could have made it work.
I wish Shari and I could have had more children.
I wish the friends who I thought “really got me” would still be part of my life instead of leaving me.
I wish the ministry leaders I’ve admired for so long would have been proud of me, or at least noticed me.
I wish my mom didn’t have cancer.
There’s more too, but I won’t bore you with the details.
We all have “I wish things in my life had been different” lists. They contain painful memories, disappointments, personal hurt, broken relationships, reversals of fortune, unmet expectations, and loss.
Although I have plenty of things that I wish had been different in my life, I cannot go back and change them…
And they have made me who I am today—scars and all… Read More
Life is disappointing. There, I said it.
I don’t mean, in the final analysis when everything is added up, that the score card of life is saturated with disappointment to the point where nothing else is detectable.
But I think it’d be a cover-up to say that disappointment isn’t there. It is there. And I know it well.
Life isn’t all disappointment. It is deeply disappointing, and it is also richly rewarding. It is full of success and sorrow, victories and defeats, progress and set-backs…
Perhaps my experience is unique. Maybe everyone else is living disappointment-free.
That last line was sarcasm.
Life is disappointing… Read More
