It is early morning as I pen these words.  Everyone has disappointments in life. Usually one just gets over them in time. But for others, myself included, that is not always so easy. Can disappointments become a springboard for something better in our lives?  I mean a maturing, a positive response in handling whatever comes our way, by learning how to remain calm and confident.

There are many situations that can be frightening and uncertain.   We live in difficult days, but do our circumstances define who we are?  No. I challenge that.  The voices of other people can affect us more than we realize. So often for me, it was the disappointment in people, my expectation that they would behave in a certain way, or understand what I was going through or at least help me.  These disappointments  when that did not happen moves this topic into a deeper realm.  Perhaps we do not always understand how deeply we are affected by the disappointments in life.

Recently I have had to overcome some serious health issues that flared up in early May, resolved, then has returned in a different way. It is teaching me to listen more closely to my body, something I should have been doing all along, but obviously did not.  Sometimes the hard jolts of life wake us up to the need to make some practical changes.  Hardly the first time for a senior, but each time hopefully teaches us to be more sensitive, to listen. But do I have a teachable spirit?  Not everybody has that.  I have been asking God to hold me steady when circumstances challenge my situation and disappointments arrive. I have had a lot of disappointments in life, especially some big ones.

What has really disappointed me the most this year was not being able to get to my home town in May to tidy Mom’s grave and bring her a new wreath. I usually visit three times a year, and feel proud at how her gravesite is tidy and neat. There were other major things I planned to do in that spring visit, including helping with the 80th Anniversary of D-Day. It also affected my goal of finishing filming all the tombstones in the  two main cemeteries in Coe Hill. It was to be a very special time with my son. Family sickness ended that trip.

When one is blocked from one’s main goal in life, be it a health crisis, death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or the ending of  a  marriage, (or no partner at all), these can be challenges to stay positive, to believe the best.  It is vital to have a spirit of hope, that something good can come out of whatever you are experiencing. That is faith, the positive of overcoming any disappointment.  Easy to pen these words, but it has taken a lifetime for me to begin to live what I am saying.

What I have been learning is that is it my own attitude that matters far more than action. I am by nature a doer.  Doers want to be active. When circumstances hinder that, or something does not happen as one hoped, even prayed for, we tend to respond in a pattern we have developed over a lifetime.  So this challenged me to try and identify my own patterns. I asked God the hard question: Does mine need to change?  What about my attitudes?  Yes, they do.

Years ago that might have sent me spiraling into depression. I don’t do that anymore, or extremely rarely. I know it is not a focus on perfection, but continually growing. A greater need for appreciation for those around me, for what I have, for what I can still do, and better than that, the assurance something good is going to happen.

“It is a glory to overlook an insult.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is kind and worthy of praise, think on those things.  Philippians 4:8