Disappointment can be a four-letter word

Disappointment has four syllables yet it conjures responses consisting of one-syllable, four-letter words. It's frustrating, exhausting, cyclical, and painful. You feel like you've been had. You're the butt of some cosmic joke - except you don't get it. It's not even remotely funny.

Disappointment occurs when expectation and reality converge in a tangled mess of hurt. You've built something up in your head to be a certain way and when reality hits, it's more like a tidal wave than an ocean breeze. It knocks you off your feet and sends you reeling. I embarrassingly confess that I am a fairy tale type of person. I love stories. I love when the hero suddenly throws a punch at the villain unexpectedly right at the end when all hope had been lost. I hold firmly to that expectation that somehow good will prevail. My heart's desire will be fulfilled. After years and years of disappointment and unfulfilled expectations, I still am that girl...waiting, hoping, dreaming, believing.

So, should I tell myself to listen to history? To survey the tell-tale signs of the past only to give up and lower my expectations? Would I somehow be happier if I was pleasantly surprised when situations turned out well? or when people turned out to be better than who I thought they were? I don't want to live in a world like that. I don't want to think less of people just so when they rise to their true worth, I am stunned and amazed. I want to believe in more than that. I want to believe that God has more for us than low expectations.

As an almost therapist, I know that unmet expectations spell disaster for relationship. And while these words ring in my academic heart and I know how it plays out in interpersonal relationships, I hear another voice calling me to believe in something bigger. I choose to believe that people are better than their circumstances, better than their actions, better than maybe they even believe.

I think I'd rather take decades and decades of disappointment than a lifetime of low expectations, but you may hear some four-letter words come out of my mouth in that time waiting and dreaming and hoping.