So yesterday we did some bird’s eye view of God’s disappointments-specifically in Abraham and also in Jeff and my experience in San Jose. Now this morning we’re going to look at another example of how God disappoints us, but we’re going to take a closer look at this one passage, because there is a process going on, that I think we might too often miss. It’s too easy to glibly say, Ok Lord I give you all my expectations! I’m yours! There might be more to it. If we do that we short-circuit the real work God’s wanting to do. So, appropriately for a women’s retreat, let’s look at the story of Lazarus in John 11. This is one of the most common passages for women’s studies, so most of you are pretty familiar with it, but let’s just look at it chunk by chunk focusing on a few key verses.
V. 3: The sisters sent to Him. We’re going to start with some pretty basic questions here. Why would they send to Jesus? They expected Him to heal Lazarus. This was their expectation. Lazarus is sick. Jesus loves Lazarus. Jesus can heal. Therefore, send to Jesus and tell him so that He can come heal Lazarus. (Sound familiar? I have a problem. Jesus loves me. Jesus can fix problems. Tell Jesus my problem and expect him to fix it.)
V. 4 One of the most significant lines of scripture, Jesus claims that the sickness is not unto death (will not result in death), but is for the purpose that God will be glorified. It’s actually safe to say that all that God does (or doesn’t do) is for this purpose. This is the overarching purpose of God. Now we don’t know whether Mary and Martha got this report. But either way, they expected Lazarus to be healed by Jesus and live. If they got the message, they would surely have that expectation, and even if they didn’t, they naturally expected Jesus to beat feet there to heal him right away. So, you all know the story, what does Jesus do?
V.5-6 Because Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, he stayed two more days in the place where He was. Again, one of the most significant lines in Scripture. This means that Jesus deliberately let Lazarus die. Remember what I said earlier? God doesn’t just use disappointments for good, He causes them. He disappoints us on purpose. Everything that God does is deliberate. Jesus deliberately waited 2 days, so that Lazarus would die. He disappointed them. He thwarted their expectations. Perhaps you say, Jesus didn’t know Lazarus had died (I don’t think any of you would say that but perhaps someone would).
V. 11-15 proves that Jesus knew exactly what was happening, He knew that Lazarus was dead, and “was glad”. Why? Purpose? THAT YOU MAY BELIEVE. The reason God deliberately disappoints His people? That we may believe. This means that He has an even greater purpose than raising someone from the dead. Even greater than life. Belief is even greater than life. That doesn’t seem logical that He’s disappoint people in order to get them to believe, huh? It seems like He’d want to fulfill our every wish so that we’d believe that He’s able. Nope. Doesn’t work like that. Romans 5:1-5…it is through trials and suffering that hope is borne. It seems like it would be the opposite, but God knows how to birth true hope, which is through disappointment and thwarted expectations.
So basically they get to the house and Lazarus has already been dead and buried 4 days. I love this–Jesus doesn’t just miss the boat by a few minutes-by FOUR days! He really blew it! Dead, buried, gone. All hope is gone. Lazarus is DEAD. And now here’s the thing that is so remarkable about God. He doesn’t just kind of disappoint us. When He strips away something, He lets it die all the way. It isn’t like Lazarus just breathed his last and maybe there’s hope of reviving him within the hour. When God lets something die in our lives, it’s dead. He lets it die all the way. SO dead. Dead and buried 4 days. It stinks. He lets it sink in. He lets us grieve, wail, weep. When He disappoints us, He chooses the things that will cut right to the very core of our being.
Picture this with me. Mary and Martha, who had placed all their hope in Jesus to save their beloved brother, and now Jesus has utterly and completely failed them. Jesus has failed them and now their brother is dead. They are weeping, mourning. It is all over. And as I said, when God lets something die in our lives, it really dies. He has a miraculous way of making sure those dreams, those hopes, those desires, the things that we are hoping IN are really truly dead. So dead that we are devastated, disappointed, grieving. This kind of sounds cruel, huh? We kind of start to wonder what kind of God would let us go through all that?
But here is the remarkable thing we see in this passage: God grieves with us. The shortest verse in the Bible, v. 35: Jesus wept. He “groaned in His Spirit” and was troubled. Why? He is God, so obviously it’s not because He thought, “Oh shoot, I should have gotten here earlier!” He chooses to feel all that we feel. He is in us, with us, loves us so intensely that when we are crushed, He is crushed. And I love this because it’s so remarkable that He would do this, even though He knows the outcome. He could have said, “Silly ladies, quit yer crying-I’m gonna take care of it!” But he doesn’t, He enters into our disappointment. I’m so bad at this as a mom because Dutch will be waiting to go for a walk, and then I remember I have to run and get something, and he acts like the world is falling down around him, and I just think, “Come on! I’ll be there in a second.” But Jesus chooses to feel every pain, every disappointment, ever heartache with us. If you think that God is aloofly and distantly watching, even inflicting your pain from afar, I am here to tell you you are wrong. That is not the God we serve. The God we serve and love and worship chooses to experience every ounce of pain that we experience, with us. When He chooses to afflict us, He is choosing to afflict Himself. If you are hurting, God is hurting with you. Please, ladies, hear me. God weeps with you. God has wept with me. He wept with them. He weeps with you. He is the God who grieves.
Now because of this, we can bravely and honestly enter in to those disappointments. Here’s the thing, we acknowledge the big stuff: the death of a loved on, the San Jose thing, cancer. Obviously it’s ok to admit that those things hurt, but I’m coming to realize that we spend a huge majority of our life in the midst of the little disappointments, little wounds, little afflictions. And the thing about those is that we are so good at ignoring them. Follow me in this for a minute. I remember reading a book by Larry Crabb called Inside Out, and it was saying that what the majority of us do, in order to stay happy, sane and content, is that we pretend like disappointments and pains do not exist. We aren’t honest with ourselves. This hit me like a ton of bricksWe moved into this home in McMinnville a few years ago and it had really oddly painted walls. The bathroom was a bright yellow, not a pretty yellow, but a glaring urine yellow that was jarring, like it glowed even when the lights were off. The master bedroom was lime green and the smaller bedroom was two alternating shades of turquoise-bright teal. The bathroom and the second bedroom were small and easy enough to fix, we just repainted them. But the master bedroom was very large and had huge vaulted ceilings. No easy paint job. Upon seeing the soaring ceilings and quickly evaluating the cost and effort it would take to repaint, I quickly insisted that I liked the color. I like it. It’s apple green. This is the approach I take to a disturbing portion of life. I like it! It’s beautiful. It’s apple green! Ok, but here’s the thing ladies it was not apple green. It was hideous. And I don’t care what The Secret says, no amount of positive thinking was going to change the fact that it was not apple, or pear, or pistachio, or leaf or anything attractive, it was lime and it was awful.
Now, hear hear, the point is NOT about me having a perfectly painted house. My desires being met is NOT what makes me happy and content in life. But we wrongly assume that if we acknowledge we don’t like something, then we will be miserable. If we acknowledge that we don’t like a situation, or that a disappointment still hurts, or that a person has truly inflicted a wound on us, then we reveal our weakness. By admitting that something hurts, bothers us, or disappoints us, we reveal that we are shallow, weak, unspiritual, and needy. We reveal our vulnerability, and we are afraid that by acknowledging these things, we will never be happy. However, the opposite is true!!! So, I read this book and realize, with this revelation of profound joy-I don’t like the green walls!!!! TADA! Jeff came home that day and I was practically bouncing off the walls with joy and I said, “Guess what?! I hate that green color! Yup! It’s not apple! It’s LIME! And I hate it! Woohoo!”
Of course he thought that I’d gone totally insane and probably thought, “Oh no, now I have to paint the room.” But no, I told him, “You don’t have to paint the room, because get this-I don’t have to have perfectly colored walls in order to be happy! I can hate the color of my walls and still rejoice and be perfectly content!” I know, you are thinking I am totally insane at this point (You see why I didn’t share this story on the first night because you would have gotten in your car and driven home). But the key is this: If we think that we must lie to ourselves, and pretend that we are ok with every little thing in our lives, then we will never be truly, profoundly, and deeply content. We will have constructed a flimsy façade of seeming contentment that is nothing more than a sorry cover for our unhappy lives. This, ladies that I LOVE, this is why we must experience the pain, we must enter in to disappointment. We must acknowledge-this is different from what I expected. And it hurts. God, I am willing to be vulnerable and admit that I’m not as tough and as spiritual as I’d like to think, and the bottom line is that I’m hurting. The bottom line is that I don’t like the green paint. Can you help me to rejoice anyway? Can you help me to be both honest and rejoicing? GOD CAN WORK WITH AN HONEST HEART.
So let’s go back and think about our disappointments that we wrote down, or perhaps even things in our life right now. Can we be brave enough to tell God that the truth of the matter is that I’m really disappointed. My expectations have been thwarted, and I’m wondering what is going on.
This past year has been an adventure and God has taught me so much about having an honest heart.
For over six months now we have lived with my parents so that Jeff could go to seminary. We left our home, which I loved, our home-town, and our income to live on our savings with my parents. This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I feel like the very essence of who I am, as a woman, is to make our home, to create beauty and order and a haven for our family to rest and replenish. We constantly had people over, ministry events, hosted things for people. Hospitality pulses through my veins. I love being a homemaker. I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize. We sold almost all of our belongings and moved the rest into my parents shop, and packed what was left into their two upstairs bedrooms.
They are wonderful people. But I feel like every day I die. I feel like my personality, my identity, my purpose, all felt like it was stripped away. They live miles and miles out of town, on a windy country road, so my daily walks, my visits with neighbors, and friends were all gone simultaneously. Our second car died and we have no job so we can’t get another, so I am truly stranded out here in the wilderness where I don’t know anyone and don’t even have cell phone service.
All of a sudden we weren’t a family anymore, I was back to being a high school girl except now it felt like I had a boyfriend and a son living with me too. I’m the recipient of charity. My dishes, my kitchen stuff, my décor, my everything is gone. I have no projects, no purpose. Even cleaning-instead of being a homemaker I feel like a maid.. I had no idea how this all would strip me down.
I’m writing this all because I have to pour it out. I have to be honest if I’m going to relinquish this to God. I feel like our family has been stripped away, like we’re no longer the Pattersons, we’re Bill & Karen’s kids. We have no family unit of our own. We don’t dance in the kitchen anymore or run around in our jammies.
So all of this to say, I’ve let my heart get fixed on somehow getting out-and getting out soon. I feel like I’ve died all I can die and I can’t do it anymore. I keep telling God, “I just miss my life, I miss my marriage, I miss life before.” Why does he put me in a situation where all the gifts and passions in my hear, that ones that He gave me, lie dead?
I know I have to relinquish my dream of a home, of moving out and having our family again. I know I have to let those things be crucified, even though it feels like I’m dying all over again. I know I’ve held them tightly in my grubby little hands. Instead of hoping in God, I’ve hoped in the possibility of moving out and getting a home. Instead of waiting on God I’ve waited on when we can finally move forward and get out.
So honestly I’m not yet to the place where I feel like I’ve truly relinquished it all. Right now I’m still in the Garden, crying and saying, “not my will but Yours.” I’ll trust Him that somehow He’ll resurrect the right thing in the right time. I’ll let it die. I’ll die, again. I’ll relinquish.
In February, I wrote this in my Journal/blog. This was the point when I let it all out and told God the honest truth of what I was feeling. It’s not pretty.
I’ve been swallowed up. This must be what it’s like to be my Grandma, or any really really old person who has to leave their home and take a puny boxful of their life’s belongings to a retirement home, where they are taken care of and treated like an child, patted on the head and told to do crossword puzzles or knit washcloths no one will use. They must wonder what to do. No wonder they watch TV all the time. They must cry a lot and think about the years when they were young, valued, busy. When they had the freedom to drive, to go out with friends, to clean their own homes or plant a garden. It must feel frustrating to have nothing but a potted plant to water or at best a tomato plant on their allotted 2-foot square plot of garden in the retirement home courtyard. No wonder they’re grumpy all the time. It must be hard. So hard.
That’s how I feel right now. I’ve been swallowed up. Somewhere in the last year Kari was swallowed up and now she sits inside someone else’s life. I still get glimpses of what it’s like to be me. On Friday when we hung out in Corvallis and I saw my friends-I got to be me. On Saturday when we went to McMinnville and saw precious friends and laughed and drove and played with Dutch-I got to be me. Last week when I drove up to my friend Melissa’s and went for a hike around the lake by her house-I got to be me.
But last July I drove away from me-at least that’s how it felt. I really just drove away from our home, but we entered a new life. We now live with my parents. We eat off my parents’ plates. We eat food from their refrigerator. We park in their garage. We sit on their couch. We also live in a new town. It is their town. The town is full of their friends. We also attend a new church. It is their church. The church is full of their friends. Jeff teaches a class on Tuesday nights. The class is largely a group of my parents and their friends. In July I went from being Kari Patterson, to being Bill & Karen’s daughter. I went from being wife and mother to daughter … again. Not that I have ever quit being a daughter, but I have, until this point, been a grown daughter. Now I am not quite grown anymore. I am living with my parents again, surrounded by photos of my childhood, feeling as if I’m awkwardly suspended between two lives-one where I am wife and mom, one where I am still a child. Dangling-that’s how I feel-dangling, never quite sure how to act and how to be because I am no longer me. I’ve been swallowed up.
And in this new church I have no fit. There appears to be no Kari-shaped hole that I can discern. There is a huge Jeff-shaped hole, which has been filled, and Bill and Karen shaped holes that have already been filled, and I am standing outside the front door, watching, pretending to be busy … but I’m really just watching and wondering where I went.
Dutch provides great joy-but really my role of irreplaceable mommy isn’t that big anymore. Oma and Papa provide a lot more fun, and since I leave him with them one day a week, somehow it feels that lifetimes go by while I’m away and I’ve missed a significant chunk. “He’s dong such-and-such now,” they say. “Oh, I see,” I reply, “I see I must have missed it.” But this time, this one day away, is the one golden, glorious, beautifully crafted portion of my life where I get to be me-school! At school I am wholly and completely Kari Patterson. I have value, purpose, vision. I have meaningful work to accomplish, goals to achieve, deadlines to meet. At school I am not swallowed up!
So if only, I tell myself, if only we could move out. Somehow I could create a haven, a home for our family where we could be a family again. Somehow I could be me! Somehow I could be all grown up again. I could cook meals for my family and we could eat off our own dishes! I could decorate and clean and beautify our home, or I could make a mess and not clean it up for three days-because it’s home! Home home home! We could come home! I could be ok not having a place to serve at church just yet, if only I had a place to rest my head where I could somehow just be myself. It’s as if I’ve spent ten years out on my own developing into a woman and then all of a sudden I’ve been told that those ten years didn’t happen, and I need to forget everything that’s taken place during that time.
But we can’t move out until we know if Jeff will have a job at the church. We have no income; we can’t move out until we know if we will have an income. So we wait. “Soon,” they say. “Soon.” So every stupid Tuesday, as Jeff goes into the church office for his meetings, every stupid Tuesday, I tell myself to not get my hopes up. Every stupid Tuesday I wait for him to call-at 2:45-and tell me how his meetings went. Every stupid Tuesday I hope they will give him an answer-that they will give him an answer that will give me my life back. And I convince myself-every stupid Tuesday-that it doesn’t matter and that I’ll be ok no matter what. And every stupid Tuesday he calls and I listen as he says, “Yeah, my meetings went great …” and he begins telling me the details of the staff meeting and then my stomach does that thing-that thing where I feel sick and where that stupid lump comes up in my throat and I realize I’ve done it again: I’ve gotten my hopes up. And then I do what I know I will do. I ask, “Did he say anything about …?” and Jeff knows what I mean and he gets quiet then says, “No, Sauce, no. I’m sorry.” And then I get silent and cry, and I feel stupid all over again because I realize I’ve done it again-I’ve gotten my stupid hopes up that sometime, one of these times, we’re going to get some good news that someone will give him a job and we’ll get to move out and I can have my life back again. And I do it every stupid Tuesday. And every stupid Tuesday I chide myself and say “You’re supposed to wait on God, not on them. Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.” And then I sit and wonder when the strength will come and why I’m weary and fainting. Every stupid Tuesday.
So this is what I was going through this past year. And I will tell you that this journal entry was a turning point in my life. When I finally was just honest with God and wasn’t afraid to acknowledge my pain and disappointment, things began to happen in my heart. Not that our circumstances got any better, in fact they didn’t, and actually some even bigger disappointments came. But God began to work in my heart. It was a lesson for me in honesty, before God, but also before others. Why do we think that we must always have the right, spiritual answer? Yes there is a right, true answer, and praise God for the times when we can truly answer in faith even when our feelings aren’t there. I’m not saying that we are driven by our emotions, but I am saying that it is a powerful thing when we can humble ourselves enough to say “I know this is what I should be feeling, but I’m not. This is where I truly am.” God can work with an honest heart.
The last thing we want to talk about this morning is fear. I’m beginning to realize that there is a link between the pain of past disappointments and fear of relinquishing our expectations. We ignore the pain of the past, but because it is still there, it haunts us, and paralyzes us, and it keeps us from trusting God unconditionally and keeps us forever grasping for a fabricated picture of expectation of what we hope will happen.
Then the expectations aren’t realized, we’re disappointed, but we try to ignore it, and just anesthetize ourselves by setting up another idea of expectation to hope in, and when that doesn’t happen we do it again and again and again, until our life is just one vicious cycle of thwarted expectations. And we either continue in this cycle, stupidly perseverant in our ways, or we become jaded, despondent, cynical, and critical. We begin to believe the lie-God isn’t good. We believe that because we see a cycle, over and over and over, of how God has not answered prayer, how He has not come through, how He hasn’t given me what I need.
If God loved me He would do this. And he didn’t. He allowed my dad to die, this to happen, my marriage to fall apart. And expectation after expectation is disappointed, when God didn’t design those expectations to be in place in the first place.
So after we identify our expectations (which we did last night), I like to go through and think about, what fear is causing me to set up these expectations. A few examples: Relinquishing a relationship (we’ll talk more about when God broke my heart) My fear was: being unloved and alone. I was afraid that I would never truly be loved. This was probably the most intense and paralyzing fear, and it’s VERY common in women.
Going to San Jose: expectations of ministry. I realized I had a fear of failure. I was so scared that we would take this step of faith, leave everything, and then not be able to cut it. I didn’t want to be someone who took a leap of faith and left, went out, and then came home to Corvallis with my tail between my legs, realizing I couldn’t make it out there on my own. I was afraid of failure. (talk about getting faced with my fear!)
Living with Mom and Dad: I was afraid that we took this huge step of faith, and responded in obedience, that Jeff would never get a job, and that we’d realize that no one actually wanted us. I remember someone saying, “So you’ve never actually been paid by the church?” And the horrible realization coming over me (a lie)-we’re just wannabes! We feel called by God to serve Him full time in a pastoral church setting, but it’s all a pipedream! It’s all a figment of our imagination because no one wants to hire us! We’ve been fooling ourselves! You can’t be a pastor if no one wants you to be. This fear paralyzed me, and kept me insisting upon my expectations, rather than relinquishing them and trusting God. I was also afraid that our marriage would dissolve, that Dutch would have no relationship with Jeff and would love my parents more than him. All sorts of fears swarmed my mind and heart.
I think the most common fear is that we aren’t valuable. We fear that at our core, we are not valued, precious, and worthwhile, so we spend our energy defining ourselves by our relationships (friends, husband, kids), by our job, our accomplishment, our ministry. We set up expectations, we look forward to things, because we’re afraid that without relationships, without a house or projects or a job or stuff to do, then we won’t have meaning and value. Or, perhaps the ultimate fear is that of death, for us or someone we love. This is real, and can paralyze us and keep us from relinquishing control.
It’s not always easy to identify fears. It’s especially hard because when we’re in the middle of it it’s always hard to see. But if we stop and quiet ourselves, search our hearts and ask God, Please show me my fear that is driving me away from your presence and driving me to set up these false expectations. Again, at this point I’m still not even asking you to relinquish your expectations and your fear. I think there’s still another piece, which we’ll talk about later today. For right now, we’re just searching and asking, God help me work through the pain in my life, help me to identify what fears are holding me back from trusting you completely. Let’s Pray.
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