Disappointment

It’s been a week now. A week of frantic "chirping," if that isn’t too sweet of a name for it, from morning until night by a sparrow that has blatantly resisted every attempt I have made to dissuade him from caterwauling around my house. Other people laugh—my neighbor suggested that pimples are causing the girls to ignore him; another fellow suggested an on-line dating service, to find him a lady-sparrow; and a woman who was in my house was surprised that I was annoyed by that. Of course, I had all the windows closed at the time, which reduces the volume, and most things are tolerable for five minutes. Up close the sparrow sounds like a chick that has wandered away from the heat lamp; from a distance he sounds like a whole nest of starlings.

From morning until night.

It’s hard to say if it’s a bad thing, all told, in spite of that fact that I am probably only about half sane after a week of it. I’d been feeling something in my throat, and know very well that something is going on in my heart. I’m "stuffing" something, and although I can’t remember when I first noticed this physical sensation (which I know is a symptom of "stuffing," because I’ve experienced it before) I know for certain it’s been at least a month. My point is that I might be tempted to just go on living, and go on "stuffing" whatever it is, if the sparrow wasn’t making an obnoxious racket all day long.

It drives me to tears, quite honestly, although I don’t know if it would were everything else okay. This evening I was reading a little about stress (me? Stressed?) which was defined as mis-handled disappointment, and realized that I am very disappointed, indeed. To make a bad matter very bad, I am disappointed with God.

I know, I know, they always say that Jesus is the only one who will never disappoint you, but it isn’t true! He’s broken my heart, not for the first time, and it’s devastating, to put it mildly. When your friends disappoint you, you can go to Jesus. When he disappoints you, when he hurts you … where do you go, then? There is no place to go. No place to go but closer to him.

Unfortunately, I can feel my heart wanting to put its arms around itself, and sit on the opposite end of the couch (so to speak) to protect itself from more hurt and more disappointment. I don’t want to be there: I want to be close, and I desperately want to trust. I want my heart to be light.

Meanwhile, I wait and I hurt and I hurt and I wait, and recognize—intellectually, at any rate—that God is good and that He has a good plan, and that I really am more valuable to God than sparrows.

And long for the day when I know it with my heart, too.

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