My Life Is Not What I Expected

As a small boy I was spellbound by the night sky. Late one November evening, while staying at a friend’s cabin, tucked in the woods of Massachusetts, my friend and I stumbled through the dark pine trees and made our way to a wooden dock reaching out into the nearby lake. We laid there on our backs for hours, motionless, staring up at the innumerable twinkling lights brilliantly littered across the black canopy above us. As I gazed out into endless space, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I knew I wanted to go there. I wanted the stars.

OUR DREAMS
Whether you had aspirations of becoming an astronaut, a doctor, or a dragon slaying knight, we all grew up believing in adventure. Parents and teachers encouraged our imagination. “You can be anything you want to be!” And our dreams weren’t limited to just our profession. From Aladdin to Harry Potter, the stories we were told gave us visions of a life filled with starry-eyed love and heroic quests. To this day, don’t we still yearn for thrilling journeys, storybook romances, picture-perfect families, meaningful careers and extraordinary faith?

A HEAVY DOSE OF REALITY
Shocking as it may be for you to learn, I never made it to the stars. And today the chances are pretty slim that I’d excel in NASA’s astronaut application process. Instead, as I grew up, reality slowly grounded my childhood dreams. My hopes of being a space traveler faded into nothing more than a memory and, as time passed by, I began to learn firsthand that life down here on planet earth is hard. Really hard.

Unmet expectations about relationships and nagging dissatisfaction in my circumstances troubled me in high school, persisted during college, and have seemed to only multiply since I graduated and made my way into the “real world”. Friendships were strained and lost, ambitions were unreachable and altered, personal growth was stunted and stalled, and God seemed distant and disinterested. After years of painful disappointments I gradually decided, in a sense, to stop looking up at the stars I once loved. Why bother? Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I found myself thinking, “meaningless, everything is meaningless.”

DISILLUSIONMENT
Maybe you too have grown to realize that the life you’re living is far from the life you thought you’d have. Maybe you’ve been let down by your grades, your relationships, your college experience, your career path, your family, or your beliefs. Maybe you’ve seen more than enough failure, loss, depression, anxiety, sin, loneliness, affliction, or simply overwhelming monotony. Maybe the stars you once longed for have faded behind the fog of disillusion.

This sense of prevailing disenchantment can be so wounding because it so easily robs us of hope and purpose. Soon we start to cynically look at the world as a cold place of defeat and emptiness. It can cast a dark shadow on the way we view our aspirations, the people around us, and our God.

A DISAPPOINTING MESSIAH
Jesus’s own disciples must have tasted this bitterness of disillusionment too. For hundreds of years Israel had been awaiting a Messiah, a conquering king, to arrive in triumph to defeat their enemies, and put Jerusalem back on top. Instead of this they got a dusty carpenter from Nazareth who was rejected, arrested, humiliated, and eventually executed. Jesus had repeatedly told his disciples that the Kingdom had come, but how could they trust him? It didn’t look at all how they expected it to look.

A MAGNIFICENT MESSIAH
Yet, from this side of the cross, we can see that while the disciples’ own expectations of greatness were being let down, something far greater was happening right before their eyes. Jesus didn’t come to conquer nations, he came to conquer a much more potent adversary. He came to defeat sin. He didn’t come to establish an earthly kingdom, he came to establish a heavenly one. He came to establish his church. And because of the victory he achieved and the people he brought together, he gave to his disciples, and now to us, a story to be a part of that is so substantial it can be an abiding hope to us even when every expectation or dream we’ve held dear is crashing down around us.

A FAR GREATER STORY
If Jesus really is who he said he was, it means that the gospel is the story we’ve been longing to be a part of our whole lives. It means that though we struggle to understand our lives, the God of heaven created us to actually know him. It means that while we are broken with selfishness, our Redeemer has come to save us. It means that in our suffering and grief, our Lord is there to comfort us. It means that in the wreckage of relationships, our Father unites us as a family. It means that though the world is filled with sorrows, our King will return to set things right. It also means that God sometimes graciously disillusions us with our earthly plans so that we would learn to find our lasting treasure in Jesus.

THE GLORIOUS STARS
So no, I’ll never rocket through space like I’d imagined as a boy. And yes, the pain and confusion of life on earth lingers and cannot be easily explained or fixed. But in light of the gospel, I am able to quietly marvel at the stars again, and even more profoundly because I now know that their beauty and power are meant to point me to the story I’m a part of by knowing their Creator. Our Creator. It is in relationship with him that we can believe in real adventure again. We can risk daringly, fight sin openly, love recklessly, and participate boldly in God’s mission to rescue the world.

This adventure of faith, like the first disciples’ view of Jesus, probably won’t look much like our expectations. The Lord still allows us to experience affliction and disillusionment here and now. But like the disciples, we can learn to endure disappointment, failure, longing, and suffering even if they last our entire lives, because it is through the gospel of Jesus Christ that God comes near to us and promises, “The story is far from over.”

FAITH ON CAMPUS
Your story matters to us at Veritas. If you’re college aged, we have a specific way for you to see your part in the story God is writing here at Veritas. On the first Thursday of every month the college students of Veritas meet together for Faith on Campus, a time to get to know each other, discuss issues of faith like this that are significant for the student, and talk together about how we can be the church. We’d love for you to join for our next Faith on Campus.

by Jeremy Lutjens
Pastoral Resident
Short North Congregation