Disappointment

I like wild birds. Not sure why, but I do. Late last year I started putting up bird feeders and now we are over run with birds. My favorites are the woodpeckers. We have downy, hairy, red bellied, yellow shafted flicker, and pileated. They eat from our feeders and we smile at the mess they make. Sure the doves are sweet, and the gold finches pretty, but when that pileated gets to pounding a hole in a log … How can you not appreciate their uniqueness?

Two days ago I was startled by a loud bang from one of the screens (we have those old metal screens). I took a quick look out the window and saw one of the newly fledged downey woodpeckers, a male, lying motionless on the deck. When I was near enough to notice, I realized he was still breathing, so I picked him up, put him in a box and hoped for the best. Nothing more than a stunned bird.

Turns out I was in for disappointment. 24 hours later the bird was dead. The disappointing part was that 3 hours after the collision he was pecking my hand hard enough to draw blood. That gave me hope that a recovery was in the works. Now I get to have a bird funeral.

As I whined to myself I started to think about why I was disappointed. I have always wanted a pet bird. Something unique. A wood pecker definitely filled that bill. The downey was such a bully in spite of its small size (smaller than a sparrow) that I always rooted for it to get the best suet from the feeder. Really though, it was the fact that all my plans, plans based on the bird recovering came to nothing.

This is where I think disappointment gets interesting. See, I couldn't have been disappointed without hope. Hope is a foundation of faith (Hebrews 11:1), not the foundation, a foundation. If I place my spiritual hope in the wrong thing, as I grow in my relationship with God that hope will be seen for what it is, misplaced. This means that disappointment is a natural part of faith.

The danger here is the idea that disappointed hope somehow means God has abandoned us. Our disappointment does not come from God, but from the realization that our hope was poorly placed.