On Disappointing People

You will disappoint people in life. The only question is what you will do about it.

Photo by Roman Holoschchuk on Unsplash

Like failure in general, disappointing people is inevitable in life. As hard as you try to meet people’s expectations and even your own expectations, you will let people down. Being a parent is a great way to learn this. Children place all kinds of demands on you and invite you to live into various responsibilities, and you simply can’t meet them all. A toddler wants you to read all the books on the bookshelf. A 6-year old wants you to “look what I can do!” fifty times a day. A 10-year old expects activities and adventures over the summer so they aren’t boreeed. And so on. On top of this, parents have the expectations of a marriage to think about. And also friendships, church relationships, work relationships, and neighbors. Everyone has demands and expectations of us. Some of those expectations are reasonable and even just and we should seek to live up to them, and some of them are unreasonable and even unjust. Sometimes it’s not so clear whether those expectations are reasonable or not. And sometimes it doesn’t matter how reasonable the expectations are, we fail to meet them anyway. When that happens it hurts because disappointing a loved one means admitting we are inadequate, we have failed to live up to their best ideal of who we ought to be. So, the question today is, how do you respond when you’ve disappointed someone? How do you respond in a way that leads to healing, reconciliation, and maturity, rather than despair? What is a godly way to deal with disappointing others?