Disappointment

It takes mature discipline in our lives to overcome disappointments.  Many disappointments are related to small matters, and are often related to some of our preferences without regard for the variances in the human systems applied by others.  The disappointments addressed here arise gradually in the lives of persons related to their beliefs and contexts of life and matters to which they give attention.  The following comprise a list borne in our lives, and to which we may have much, little or no interest or influence.

1. Families are not as well integrated and close as Scripture affirms they ought to be.  Perhaps the family before the urban and technological age was closer integrated in the persons of the family than is the current situation in which generational differences have gained broader application.  Formerly the family took care of its members.  Today the obligation is more and more turned over to social programs for financing with reduced expectation from families except to monitor the insurance type programs for retirement, health care, and other services that, more and more, require business management for life with reduced attention from family members.  The cost to society in the substitution of public and private services for family love and care is enormous.  The changing profile does not appear to offer the happiness and relationship that a well formed family provides.  Even so the emphasis of Scripture related to families must imply that family solidarity has always been an issue needing attention, education and commitment.

2. Friendships are an extension of the family ideal.  Some friends bereft of family, may virtually become members of our families.  There is more that can be included in family than blood and a legal system to adoption.  The loss of family solidarity and brotherhood (friends) has led to oddities in society such as the redefining of marriage, and the assumption of order based on currency rather than both creation (biology) and morality (righteousness).  Some current important laws are justified by the fault-line (depravity) in the human race.  With the affirmative human advances found in modernization, we seem bent on also adding negative human reverses so to raise doubt about the survival of peaceful and loving society.

3. Education, formal and informal, of youth offers too little information for life experience.  It is currently dominated by perceptions of professional life.  Values, role playing of life experiences, and the variances of contexts are missed or subdued.  Students sent into the world may be excellent for engineering, medicine, business or other profession and have no real understanding that successful life is related to a quality of person that an individual can become.  (Currently the country has been shocked by a college graduate who, hired for millions of dollars annually to play professional football, left a pre-season game and raised a finger of derision to the fans in the stands.  He is fined for the crude gesture, and has apologized.  What has been missed in his life that the matter would even occur?  If he missed decency in his family nurture, how did he miss it in his formal education and appropriate daily relationships with others?)

*4. Contradictions/Paradox, found in Aaron, David, Solomon, Asa, Peter, Mary at Jesus’ 12^th year, and others in Scripture, and church history as in Luther, Calvin and some missionaries/pastors/leaders from all generations including my own of course, and my personal failures – have on occasion weighed heavily upon my interpretations of life that include contradictions of many Christians with Scripture, life-walk and meaning.  My only resolution is that if persons were as excellent as they should have been we might be so depressed with ourselves we would not emerge as most of those persons did, excused by the massive sacrifice of Christ for the purpose of making us acceptable to God.  This does make me thankful for the suffering of Jesus Christ so to make up, for persons of faith, the differential between that we are to that we become.  We point to disappointments that may lead to diminishing faith in God at work in declaring persons acceptable for God’s Kingdom.  The call to us reduces skepticism about life and meaning.