I Was Supposed to Wake Up in Greece
Bad Christian advice and choosing to feel
I was supposed to be on the first leg of a trip to Greece this morning.
Almost two years ago, an organization reached out to me about leading a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We scheduled it for November of 2023. A month before we were set to leave, Hamas attacked Israel, Israel retaliated upon Hamas, as well as innocent Palestinians, and our trip was halted. I called it a pivot and we moved all the travelers who could and wanted to over to a spring 2024 Greece trip.
Last weekend we had a family emergency that necessitated a one-way ticket to Georgia for Nate. We spent hours on Friday trying to discern whether I needed to step away from the trip to Greece completely, or whether I could arrive late to the trip, or whether I needed to step aside and ask someone else to take the helm. We finally decided on the last option. By nightfall we had found my replacement (the beautiful
!) and I began the process of handing off the trip.Someone messaged me the other day saying, “I know this is just one more trip in a long line of trips that haven’t happened for you this year, and I’m sorry.” A long line? I asked myself. Oh yeah. We were supposed to leave for three months of National Parks almost exactly a year ago. With the camper packed and house cleaned and ready, we received some test results we’d been waiting on for Nate’s heart, and within minutes we were pivoting our plans yet again. A trip of a lifetime, gone in a moment.
I’ve struggled some to talk about these plans gone amok. Why? Well, because a heart issue and a geo-political war and a family emergency pale in comparison to a dashed hope of traipsing all over the world and United States. What kind of monster complains about that? These are human lives we’re speaking of here, and you want to talk about how you’re sad you didn’t get to hug the Sequoias?
In my late teens, on a small television we were rarely allowed to watch, one film was played repeatedly. The Princess Bride.1 One line has always stuck with me, Westley’s to Inigo Montoya, “Get used to disappointment.”
I am no natural optimist. I hesitate to say I’m a pessimist either, but that hesitation is probably borne more from Christian-culture’s demand for women to be happy and sweet and unquestionably cheerful. There was one statement from church, however, that I latched onto that helped me make sense of my repeated disappointment, thwarted plans, dashed hopes, etc., “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”
And man oh man did I latch onto that one. I’d gotten used to disappointment at that point, but now I learned the way to not even feel my disappointment was to let go of all my expectations. Great. I would become the best automaton out there.2 I would stuff down those feelings, turn a cold shoulder to any hope that wasn’t of the specifically “gospel” sort. I would not cry when I broke an engagement and canceled a wedding. I would not cry when my name was slandered, lied about, and abused. I would not cry when I lost babies or moved multiple times or couldn’t remember the last time I loved the local church. I would not cry when my brother was arrested. I would not cry when my husband lost his job or when I had to quit mine. If this was the cost for being resentment free, sign me up.
I practiced ten years of that terrible, terrible advice before it occurred to me that all it was was an awful attempt to control from the underside. Instead of allowing my grief or sadness or envy or fear or anxiety to rise to the surface and receive the blessed goodness of Jesus over it, pushing it away or pretending I didn’t have it only made me harder and more disappointed than ever before—mostly in my own self.
Getting used to disappointment only made me angry at God and letting go of any expectations only made me angry at my own self. But because of these two competing values, I could not let that anger surface at all. To feel that anger, to even acknowledge its presence felt impossible to me, a kind of faithlessness.