Disappointment With Myself

By Scott Bessenecker

Of all life’s disappointments, disappointment with ourselves can be among the most devastating. Whether body image, stupidity, or just that obnoxious inner critic, we are regularly “cancelling” ourselves because of things we say or do. Disappointment with self is the third and final post in a series that has touched upon disappointment with God and disappointment with the Church.

No Regrets = No Growth

I was at a conference where the speaker referred to something William Borden wrote on his deathbed. Borden was heir to the Borden Dairy fortune and chose to be a missionary instead of running the family business. In his final moments he wrote inside his Bible, “No Regrets.” It sounds like a Successories poster; a rallying cry designed to inspire baldfaced confidence. As I’ve pondered regrets, I’ve come to realize that it’s my regrets that have spawned my growth. A person without regrets is someone hasn’t learned from their mistakes. To face disappointment with the idiotic things we’ve said or done is an invitation to learn from them and to change. I don’t know Borden’s full story and I am sure he had many admirable qualities, but to boast that one has no regrets at life’s end strikes me as someone blind to their mistakes. Regrets are the headwaters of maturity and without them we are consigned to spiritual, emotional and intellectual stagnation.

Parenting While Young

By 21 I was married, and by 27 I’d begun my parenting journey. I didn’t really have the life experience nor the emotional intelligence to parent or partner well. Now, at 59, I feel like I’m at the right place in life to begin. But that’s not how life works. We marry and start having kids long before we’re mature enough to do so. I look with disappointment on my early days as husband and father. I wish I had known how to communicate better. I wish I didn’t have as many emotional triggers. I wish I had been a better listener. I was too inconsistent in my parenting, too much of a pushover. Other times I was too strict. I’m disappointed that at times I thought corporal punishment was the best way to shape a child’s behavior. Looking back to our early years of adulthood is bound to elicit disappointment. At least I hope it does, if it doesn’t, we’ve become stuck in adolescence. I cannot change the bad parenting or poor partnering of my 20s and 30s, but I can apologize for it and grow from it.

A Nuanced Faith

The Church is messed up, in part, because I am messed up, since I am part of the Church. When I look back at my 20-something, black-and-white, naive faith I am a little embarrassed by some of my conclusions. My faith was pretty immature for the first couple of decades, and looking back on those immature convictions I can see why some have become jaded or left the faith altogether. Others have become unable or unwilling to re-examine their youthful faith convictions. They’ve become stiff and graceless. I want a faith that has been tested by experience and made more generous and mature. When you first fall in love, that love is novel and more like infatuation. But 35 years of marriage allows for maturity and depth. When I became a serious Christian at age eighteen, there was a wonderful naiveite to my faith. It was uncomplicated, but it was also shallow. Forty years of God-love has hopefully brought some thoughtfulness and depth. My faith involved its share of fights with God, of slammed doors, of deep conversations. It’s come with seasons of passion, times of joy and dark nights of silence. I refuse to choose between a jaded faith and a superficial one. Disappointment with my adolescent faith has provided the compost in which to grow something rich.

Conclusion

Disappointment with God, the Church and our own shortcomings is a doorway. Rejecting God, Church or self are the easy paths. They’re cheap shots. Reflection, grace and wrestling with your disappointment represent a far more difficult journey, but it’s a path that leads out of our adolescent self-absorption and into a grounded maturity.