Have you ever been disappointed about something? I mean really disappointed? Like bawl your eyes out disappointed?

I think we all have faced many disappointments in our lives. How we deal with disappointment says a lot about us, doesn’t it?

I faced a fairly large disappointment today. My husband teaches high school math, and the school where he teaches is a good 30 minutes from our house. He took the job there several years ago because we were trying to sell our house and build on land that we own that is in that area, but our house never sold. We finally took it off the market after several 6-month stints with various realtors and one “for sale by owner” endeavor.

Well, the last couple of years we’ve been thinking how nice it would be for Trevor to teach at the high school that is a couple of miles from our house, since it didn’t look like we would be moving, after all. Our budget is very tight right now, and the money we would save in gas would amount to probably $1,500 or more each year, not to mention wear and tear on the car and the time savings.

Trevor officially put in for a transfer early in the spring, and we found out today that he didn’t get the transfer. 😦

My heart sank when I read Trevor’s e-mail this morning. I wanted to cry. I was  disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong. Trevor really likes where he teaches now. The transfer would’ve been purely from a desire to save time and money. And those savings would’ve been really helpful, to our family schedule and to our family budget.

Or would they?

As humans, we sometimes want a thing (like a job transfer or to sell a home or to have a child or to marry a certain person or to win an election) really, really, really badly. So badly that we can almost taste it. Have you experienced that? And if we don’t get it, it hurts. It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing.

But have you ever been glad later that you didn’t get that thing that you really, really, really wanted? I have.

Many times.

As Christians, we need to trust that God knows what’s best for our lives. If He says “no” to something that we desire an awful lot, we must believe that He has something even better in store. Or perhaps He is protecting us from something that would’ve hurt us. Bottom line: He knows all things and if we allow Him to direct our lives, He will do a much better job of it than we will.

On the contrary, if we fight against God’s leading and force the circumstances to work out the way that we want, we just might regret it. I’ve done it. We probably all have at one time or another. If we jump ahead of God and try to make things happen in our lives, we usually find that we wish we had waited on Him.

So, after my little pity party about Trevor not getting the transfer, I had a really exciting thought…..maybe we’ll try again to sell our house and build near his current school (which is also near my parents and sister—an even bigger plus). It’s a totally different housing market than when we tried several years ago, so who knows? Maybe it will sell in “such a time as this.”

So, I spent a couple of hours today perusing through house plans and trusting that God’s got this situation under control. And that makes me happy. 🙂

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28