There can be chronic physical struggles that many of us face in our bodies. Whether pain of various degrees or fatigue that sometimes just can’t be located or figured out. When I had long covid in 2020-2021, the fatigue was unrelenting, the worst I had experienced since having tuberculosis in Delhi, India in 1988. My doctor had me doing various tests trying to determine what was causing the fatigue, with little effect. The big question, causing a definite frustration in me, was ‘how long will this go on’? Thankfully for me much of it was finished by 2021, but I have some friends who have chronic fatigue that has gone on for decades with no clear resolution or treatment.

Frustration and often related disappointments can certainly happen when we face these physical struggles that keep going on. But they can also be the twin chronic diseases of the soul and inner life. In my inner life, facing frustration and disappointment has been a real struggle at various seasons. Wanting to see things change either personally or in a larger context when the pace of change is either frustratingly slow or non-existent. I have learned so much about how to face disappointments from my younger daughter. She is in the acting industry in Los Angeles, California, and while she has had some great opportunities in various movies and TV shows, there have also been so many parts she has auditioned for and not gotten. And often after an audition or call back, you never hear if you are being considered or not. Like in other arenas of life, facing disappointment is a constant theme.

In a recent book on facing long-term grief, The Long Grief Journey, by Pamela D. Blair and Bradie McCabe Hansen, the authors call frustration and disappointment ‘underrated emotions’ and ‘major players’ in how people manage the unrelenting pain involved. And how they ‘create chronic states of being’ that over time, ‘influence how people view the world, others, themselves, and their future.‘(pg. 52) I learned from these authors that the meaning of frustration and disappoint in Latin is from a similar thread: for frustrate it is ‘to make of no avail, bring to nothing, prevent fulfillment’, and for disappoint it is ‘to defeat the realization or fulfillment of.’ Both words speak of a state of something hoped for being blocked or stopped from being fulfilled. Expectations smashed, or painfully delayed.

So how do we face frustration and disappointments in our lives and keep going? To let them continue as chronic inner states without being faced risks even deeper places of struggle. As Carl Jung reportedly once said, ‘Disappointment is the mother of bitterness.’ Recently I read a section of writing by Martin Luther King, Jr., who faced so many places of frustration and disappointment in his life leading the civil rights movement in the United States before being murdered in April, 1968. Dr. King wrote about how the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, in the latter years of his life, longed to go to Spain but ended up in prison in Rome. How did he face this along with so many other disappointments in his life? Here is what Dr. King writes in his article ‘Shattered Dreams‘ in the book ‘Strength to Love‘ (2010):

‘You must honestly confront your shattered dreams. To follow the escapist method of attempting to put the disappointment out of your mind will lead to a psychologically injurious repression. Place your failure at the forefront of your mind and stare daringly at it. Ask yourself, “How may I transform this liability into an asset? How may I, confined in some narrow Roman cell and unable to reach life’s Spain, transmute this dungeon of shame into a haven of redemptive suffering?” Almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God. It may lengthen our cords of sympathy. It may break our self-centered pride. The cross, which was willed by wicked men, was woven by God into the tapestry of world redemption.’ (pg. 92.)

Dr. King calls us to face our ‘shattered dreams’. To not escape the disappointments in our minds, but to place them ‘at the forefront’ and ‘stare daringly at it’. And a large part of this is a change of perspective, seeing that God can weave anything into a tapestry of Divine redemptive purposes. We often can’t see these purposes, and sometimes will not see them in our time on earth. As King goes on to write on the next page, ‘How familiar is the experience of longing for Spain and settling for a Roman prison, and how less familiar the transforming of the broken remains of a disappointed expectation into opportunities to serve God’s purposes! Yet powerful living always involves such victories over one’s own soul and one’s situation.’ (pg. 93). Dr. King faced these realities in his life, both the longings and also the transformed disappointments, before his untimely death at 39 years old.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death in 1968 brought unimaginable frustration and disappointment to his followers and much of the nation, as it left so many dreams unfulfilled. Many of course after him would continue to labor, pray and suffer for the longings he embodied, and they would come to more fruition in the decades after. But he anticipated in some ways his own death as he wrote: ‘Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our chartered course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.’ (pg. 94).

I so long to live without the ‘fatigue of bitterness’ and the ‘drain of resentment’. I rather want to see my frustrations and disappointments transformed into redemptive purposes. It is a short life we have, perhaps longer than Dr. King’s or the Apostle Paul’s, perhaps not.

How will you live your life?