An individual went for a job interview. At the interview she talked about the gifts and strengths that she has. She admitted that there were areas that she knew she still had some growing to do, but assured the interviewer that she would be able to learn quickly. She then asked about the scope of the job, what would be expected, etc. And as the interviewer was telling her about the potential opportunity, he told her about the places where she would be able to grow, the ways in which she would be able to be promoted, to get a raise, and to just do better. There was an expectation that she was going to do well and that the company would want to reward her efforts. There was a lot of praise and expectation for greatness in the conversation. After listening to all of this praise and potential she then asked, “and what about when I disappoint you?”

There were two people falling in love, and they decided to take their relationship to the next level. They talked about moving in together, about sharing life goals and hopes. They talked about how they were going to be there for each other, and how they were going to support each other. And then, one looked at the other and asked, “and what about when I have an affair, or I stop giving you all of my attention, or I don’t clean up after myself? What about when I disappoint you?”

A pastor was looking at moving to a new church. And he talked to the leadership council, to the individuals who were in charge of the details and the day-to-day workings of the congregation. As he talked to them he learned about customs and events and all of those other things that makes the life of a church rich and blessed. There was a lot of energy around how things were going to be great, about how much good the people were expecting and anticipating from the pastor and his work. In the midst of the positivity, he asked, “and what about when I disappoint you?”

“What will happen when I disappoint you?”

This is not the kind of question that we expect or anticipate especially when considering relationships of one kind or another. Yet disappointment is something that we can say with certainty that we are going to experience and that we are going to cause. We are going to be disappointed by people and we are going to disappoint people. This is a part of life. Because this is a reality of life and especially of relationships, it may be a smart thing to ask what will happen when you mess up, when you fail to arrive in time, when you say the wrong thing, when you make someone angry, and when you disappoint someone. Will you yell at me, will you be passive aggressive and make me guess what it was that I did that was wrong? Will you hold it over me for months and years? Will you say you forgive me but never truly do so? What happens when I disappoint you?

And perhaps this is a question that we should ask of ourselves as well. How will we cope and wrestle with those times that we know we have disappointed ourselves, when we know that we could have done better? How do we handle the moments when we know that we are not our best? Will we be quick to forgive ourselves or will we hold onto an anger and resentment because we know that we could have done better? Perhaps you push yourself with your studies, with your exercise routine, with your time management because you cannot hold onto the idea or the possibility that you may do something that is not perfect or wonderful and you will be disappointed.

Disappointment is a part of life. From great loss in relationships and jobs to the small loss over food not tasting as good as one hoped, we all encounter disappointment in one way or another.

I think it is good to consider the pain of disappointment especially around the idea of sin. We can often think of sin as doing something that is wrong, transgressing a law, or breaking a commandment and there may be a decent amount of truth to such an idea. Yet wrapped up in such a notion is the experience of disappointment. Something gets in the way of your relationship with God and there is going to be disappointment. Something you do breaks your relationship with others and there is going to be disappointment. There will be judgement, yes, but also disappointment.

Consider this with the notion of original sin. In the some of the more orthodox circles of Christianity the notion of original sin suggests that you are born with a mark, a debt of sorts that has been passed on from Adam and you need to figure out how to reconcile that debt. It means that you are born already a disappointment. This is a notion of existence, that one is born already a disappointment, is something that I am sure will seep into one’s consciousness and sense of self.

A more theologically progressive view of original sin would move away from the idea of being marked or of born owing something that we can never pay off. Instead, some would suggest that rather than being born with original sin, you are born with original freedom. Original freedom gives one the space where they can choose to do right or wrong. You have the capacity to choose how to live, a freedom that was passed on from Adam and Eve to us. Just remember that Adam and Eve, in their many choices, chose to eat the fruit, and thus embraced the reality of disappointment in choosing to do something that God warned against. But this does not mean that we are born with the proclivity to only make bad choices, it just means that in our freedom we have the ability to choose ill or good (this is a theological concept described as concupiscence). This means that we may be a disappointment, but we may also bring joy in the way we live our lives.

The prolific Jewish author, Harold S. Kushner, in his book, How Good Do We Have to Be? suggests that original sin is living with the idea that there is not enough love to go around. Original sin, for Kushner, is living with the idea that there is a limited supply of love, that there is not an unending amount of love to find and experience. To live with this belief that love is in limited supply, compounds a brokenness that infuses relationships. For example, if you believe that there is a limited amount of love, then you are going to compete with your siblings for the love of that parent because there is not enough love for you and your siblings to share. It means that you need to be jealous of your spouse or partner’s other relationships because with every other person that the individual engages with, there is less love for you. Kushner looks at the conflict and disagreement between Cain and Able as not only the first moment of a deep and transgressing sin in the scriptures, but as a moment where we see one buying into the idea of that there is a scarcity of love. Cain believed that God had only so much love to share and that Able received the majority of it. Hence the anger and the murder and the jealousy over love not received and desire to have as much love as possible.

What Kushner is suggesting speaks to a pervasive challenge with our society. A competition over a scarcity of resources that affirm an individual. I am led to think also of Walter Brueggemann’s description of a societal worldview of scarcity in his work Prophetic Imagination. It is the idea that there is a limited, a finite amount of resources which leads us to live in such a way that we need to protect and save what we have and covet what we do not have. Again, I don’t know if I would describe this as an original sin, but it certainly is a sin that is a deep part of society. Fear of immigration, rise of nationalism, and other trends in our culture all come from this worldview that embraces a notion of scarcity.

Let us take this idea back to relationships. Take this back to the reality that you can disappoint someone to a point where things are painful and hurtful. We are going to disappoint each other, that is a reality of life. I actually work to make sure that there will be a section or more of my writings that will be less then stellar so that you can just get the disappointment over with. We are going to fail, to not be able to mind-read, we will misunderstand, or we will not have the energy to care in the way that we perhaps should, and we are going to disappoint each other. But, when you believe that there is only so much love to go around, when you believe that there is a scarcity of love, especially with the person that is disappointing you, the hurt is that much deeper. The hurt is deeper because with this worldview, there is no way out of the loss, because the love that was neglected is gone and can never be retrieved.

Stay with this idea of a scarcity of love. If someone disappoints you, lets you down, then you are losing some of the love that you may have to offer, you are losing some of the love in that relationship. The pain will have a cost. The hurt will be at a cost. And if you hold to a sense of a scarcity of love, then the cost cannot be regained. The results may be a deeper sense of caution, a deeper sense that one cannot move with ease in the relationship. We realize that we need to be careful. In the relationship we need to be as perfect as we possibly can be so that we will not lose any of the love that is available; there is only so much love to go around. When someone disappoints us, we will live with that hurt in a real and tangible way because it is going to cost us that much more. If this is the way that you feel or the way that you live, you may arrive at a conclusion that says that it makes more sense to not be in relationships with others. Or that you be careful and have a level of distrust. Or that you do what you can to force or control the other so that you will not run the risk of hurt and disappointment and losing some of the precious love that you have.

Consider this with a church community. If the pastor does something that disappoints the community, rightly or wrongly, and there is a belief that there is a scarcity of love (albeit unspoken), then the reaction on the part of parishioners and others could be that this is the worst thing that has ever happened, that ever could have happened. One could see a moment of disappointment as a tragedy from which one could never recover. No longer is the pastor the perfect Christian leader that you believed you could trust and follow, but is now less then, broken, and perhaps not worth being with or being your pastor. When a fellow church member does or says something that is disappointing, you may find yourself in a place where you cannot find a way to bring back together the relationship that was damaged and hurt. There is not enough love to go around.

And what about with our faith? What about our relationship with God? While our faith may give us an assurance that God ultimately does not disappoint us, we may embrace a perception of being disappointed by God. When we struggle in life, we may have the idea that God did not act, did not intervene, did not comfort in a way that we desired, and now something is lost and will never be regained. How could we ever trust God again when it feels like God has disappointed us in such a deep and painful way? Or, we consider all of the ways that we have let God down, the ways that we have disappointed God, the ways that we have been less than perfect, and maybe we find ourselves in a place where we cannot imagine God forgiving us, taking us back, because there is only so much love to go around. And maybe we embrace the image of a wrathful God, condemning us of our many and multiple flaws, because it is the only way of conceiving God that makes sense. In this view of divine-human relationship, the infinite divine still has only a limited supply of love.

We may say that there is enough love to go around. We may say that there is no limit to God’s love, but when disappointed, we act as if there is a finite supply. Perhaps this is part of what led many to turn on Jesus, to reject and hate him so much as to crucify him when Jesus walked among us. Yes, there was distrust expressed on the part of the leaders. Yes, embedded in Jesus’ crucifixion was the reaction of the institutions, the reaction of the power of the state in response to the radical ideas that Jesus brought. But there was also the profound love that Jesus offered, not just to the insiders but to the outsiders, to those who were pushed aside, seen as less, and neglected. If there is a limited amount of God’s love and grace to share (as is human to believe), then when you bring in those “others” you are making less space for the rest of us to experience the fullness of God’s love. Or so many believe. When you reach out to the outcasts then you are pushing away those who are supposed to be first in line for God’s mercy and glory. And we may wonder, “How can you still love me when you love those others as well?” Perhaps such thinking, such a gut reaction is part of what compelled a people who were one day excited to be in the presence of Jesus and the next day ready to reject him to the point of his death. We are scared that there will not be enough. We get afraid that we will be forgotten.

Such fears are the foundations of political theories and national identity. Such fears are the drivers of overbearing parents and co-dependent partners. Such fear pushes the notion that we must do everything we can, everything possible to keep God happy at all times because we cannot imagine or live with the notion that God may be disappointed.

This means that we often find ourselves saying in the same sentence that we need to make sure that we get at least a sliver of God’s approval and love and that we also say that God is infinite, great, beyond all comprehension. We still hold to the infinite nature of God, so why not the infinite nature of God’s love? Why is it that so many of us live in such a way as to have to impress God, prove to God that we are worthy, and fear that we will not be good enough? God’s love is beyond what we can know, has no bounds or limits. And yet, in our religious communities, we often do not live as if this were the truth.

I do not ascribe to the school of thought that makes God immutable (unchanging). God does get disappointed. God does get upset. God does react when we act badly. But the incredible depth of God’s love, the promise of God’s infinite nature is that there will not be a time when God says “enough, I’m done, I have no more love to offer.” As Christians, we again and again remind ourselves that through Christ, God did come to love us, to live among us, to be with us, and our reaction was to nail God to the cross in a profound display of rejection. This is a truly, radically, tragically disappointing act. And yet God’s love is without bounds, without limits, and that is why we still are offered that love through the assurance of the resurrection. Yes, the earth trembled. Yes, the heart of God broke. Yes, it was a day of pain, of rejection, of suffering, and of hurt. But God did not reject. God’s love has no limit, is not finite, but expands to the end of time, to the corners of the universe and beyond. God engages, interacts with us, and at the same time is unchanging in the divine love that is offered to us again and again.

How can we take that radical depth of love and bring it into our own lives? The truth is that we are indeed limited people. We can only run so fast, we can only work so hard, and so it seems natural to say that we can only love so much.

Yet what if God is the source of our love? I am not suggesting that we can love again and again because God gives us a kind of energy, a kind of superpower that enables us to love more than might be humanly possible. God invites and pulls you not only into that divine love, but into the way that the divine love is pulled towards the other. Think about the love-struck, starry-eyed individual who has found that perfect person to be with, to love, and to adore. They are in the crush stage of a relationship, a place where you see your beloved with that fuzzy filter where the he or she can do no wrong. All they can do is talk about their beloved, share about how great their beloved is, and want you to see their beloved in a similar way. They look and see through a fuzzy love filter and are saying, look through these eyes, and see what I can see, isn’t my beloved dreamy.

When God is the source of our love, we are pulled, drawn to see the other through the filter of God’s love. I am not saying that God sees us through a filter that is fuzzy and star-struck. God sees us as we are, faults and all. But the love is always there. Compassion and mercy are always there. God looks at us, especially when we fall and fail in our lives and says, “I still see beauty, I still see something so good that it makes my heart leap. And while at this moment my heart grieves and breaks I am not going to stop seeing the beauty that I love about you.” And God desires to pull us into that vision, that view of each other. God comes to us and says, “see what beauty is in that individual you have a difficult time being around! How wonderful.” God comes to us and says, “see what love I have for that person who is spiraling and making harmful choices. How heartbreaking and tragic!” We can be pulled into a relationship with the other through God’s presence and God’s love. And there is no scarcity of this love.

This does not mean that we become doormats to be walked over and taken advantage of. It means that we call out bad behavior, we name the hurt and the pain that comes from such behavior, but we do not say that we are done with the relationship, that we are over and that we cannot continue in some kind of relationship. Yes, relationships change. There are times when marriages should come to an end, there are times when it is right to leave a church, and there are times when the nature of the relationship needs to change in a drastic way. Yet it does not mean that the individual is gone, erased from your life. They will always have a place in who you are. Even with death, the individual will still be a part of who you are and will still call for some of the love that you have to offer. To say that all is lost and over is saying that there is no more love, that the surplus is over. There may be some that we have to distance ourselves from to stay safe, but the love that God has towards that person calls us to hold some kind of relationship, albeit distant and safe. It is a step of faith that God is one who does love us and does not reject us.

How can we take this living into a surplus of love into our relationships and our community? It is one thing to say that we will strive to look at the other through God’s loving eyes, but we would like that same kind of commitment back. This is the covenant, the commitment that we know God gives to us and we would desire from others that we meet. I wonder if it is time to rewrite the traditional marriage vows. Instead of saying that I promise to be with you in good and ill, etc., but rather to say that I promise to see you through God’s loving eyes even when you disappoint me, frustrate me, and upset me. I always want to be careful to leave some space for marriages to end, not that I want marriages to end or think that is something to be working towards, but more out of a realistic assessment that sometimes the relationship breaks to a place where the only way you can continue to love the other person with God’s love is from a distance, not a part of that relationship. But even when the covenant of marriage ends, the love that God has towards the other does not end and we can still strive to tap into the love that God has for all people.

This is a way that we can be led to be a part of a church community: to say, when we join that community, that we promise to see each other through the eyes of God’s love, and that even or especially when we get frustrated and disappointed we will still strive and work to see each other as someone loved and blessed. This speaks to what happens when we disappoint each other. When we disappoint each other, we are not saying that it is over, but that there is space still to continue to love, that with God as a part of the relationship the love will not run out. The disappointment is not a tragedy of the extreme degree, but instead a part of a relationship that can be grounded in love. That grounding continues to offer hope and room for the relationship to thrive.

There is not a scarcity of love when God is a part of the relationship. There is not a scarcity of love for ourselves or for others if God is with you in those relationships. When you disappoint other or when you are disappointed it does not mean the end of the world, but a moment when we all need to lean on God’s presence and to see with God’s eyes the beauty in the other and in the relationship that is still there. There will be enough love. Even when we are disappointed.