Is disappointment the result of hope not reached? How many have hoped for someone to do something, not like reading our minds, so don’t go there, lol, but really hoping they will meet this desired expectation? It’s quite disappointing when it doesn’t happen. When you love someone, you hope again with an extended deadline for this expectation which excuses the other disappointment. For example, if you hope that this person will schedule a lunch or coffee for your birthday coming up this week, but when it’s time they didn’t do. So, you extend grace and excuse it within yourself, drop hints over the next year, hoping they will do it for your next birthday. Note: they’re not at fault they didn’t know what you were hoping for.
We unintentionally put these expectations on others, even when we do not mean to. Based on time spent, relationships developed, seeing patterns and habits, investing time in others, and so forth, we develop this obtainable expectation for this person, at the very least that they will achieve…so we thought. So often, with family, more specifically our children, we teach, we discipline, we develop an expectation that they are a certain way, but when they act contrary it is a great disappointment. Yet we forgive, extend grace, and shift the hope in another expectation for them. I imagine the Father doing the same thing with us and His creation. He hopes that those lost will find their way, even when He knows the outcome, but He still hopes. I know it’s more than that, but why, as a parent wouldn’t He hope for something different, and expectation better than what is? Since we have free will, there truly is a possibility of different influences shifting our decision-making method if needed, so why not continue to hope, right? We are complicated people for sure, lol, and He knows it. Point being that He KNOWS us and the outcomes, the possibilities, He is more than hoping for sure. But I am sure there are moments of disappointment when we choose one thing, even though in the end we find our way back.
Faith is knowing, hope is an emotional wish even if it was derived from complicated rational thinking, algorithms, patterns, and so-called evidence to help support and conclude an expected end. However, faith is knowing and trusting God, and hope is all about us, what is within our own power. We need to remove us from the equation even more and realize much of our so-called offense, the kind that isn’t really what it is, but our feelers being hurt, is because we thought one way, hoped for a certain outcome to reach a point of disappointment. What has happened in the process where people are getting their feelers hurt, they have determined it was not their own process, which reveals one’s inability to take responsibility for their own disappointment because they hoped for something to be a specific way and it was not. Instead, there is a projected blame on another, which divulges pride in them. We have to recognize that we are no longer in the spirit in these moments, but in the flesh. We must seek the Father so we know what is, will be, and lose the disappointment, lose our flesh.
“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but [when] the desire cometh, [it is] a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12.
“He must increase, but I [must] decrease” John 3:30.
“[There is] therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded [is] death; but to be spiritually minded [is] life and peace. Because the carnal mind [is] enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” Romans 8:1-8.