When people fail us

2006 was a very dark year. Early on, I began sliding into a depression brought on by childhood trauma. Within 12 months, that slide had completely upended my life and the life of my family.

In the years that followed, I went through much therapy and healing. Yet, life never did return to the old normal. I could never find my way back. Life doesn’t work that way.

I think of that no return when I watch tragedies unfolding in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Southern California, the Texas hill country, and the southern Appalachian mountains in recent months. I see it in the faces of children who have been separated from their parents or parents who have lost their children. In every one of these stories, people walking along a path suddenly find their lives totally flipped with no way to get back to what was.

When you’re traveling through life and chaos hits, you hopefully will find a way to move forward, but you will be on a different path. There’s no going back to what could have been.

Today I’m on a far different road than I could have ever imagined 20 years ago. Don’t ask me if my life is better or worse than what might have been. I don’t know how to answer that. I just know it’s different. I trust it will all make sense in eternity, that I will see how the pieces of my life connect. For now, I move forward on a different path, yet one I also also fulfilling and fruitful.

Every now and then, something takes me back to those dark days of ‘06. Such was the case the other day when I went looking for a Word doc on my computer, something I’d written recently. In the search box, I typed in a keyword – happened to be “Deuteronomy” – and up popped another piece, one I’d written 19 years ago, a paper long forgotten.

They were teaching notes, my teaching notes, though I don’t remember teaching them. It had the format I use when I’m preparing to speak. I’d also typed in the teaching date – 2006.11.06 – and that I’d written the notes just 5 days before.

As I read those long-lost notes, I vividly recalled what I was going through at the time.

My downhill trajectory began early that year. By June, I had the sensation of sliding irresistibly into a deep, conically shaped pit. By the fall, I was in full-blown depression. Sure, I was finding ways to cope, doing my best to hold life, family, and ministry together, trying hard to keep from sliding deeper. But I wasn’t doing a very good job. There was trauma to sort out, trauma from 40 years before, and I didn’t have the tools I needed to deal with it.

One day I was reading the Book of Deuteronomy and this verse jumped out: “Then you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.” The passage, Deuteronomy 1:29-31, is still marked in my Bible.

That was Moses talking. He’d led the Israelites out of Egypt, through the Wilderness, and now they were approaching the Promised Land. It had not been a very direct trip and the adults standing before him were not the adults he’d led out of Egyptian captivity. Instead, Moses was addressing the adult children of those who’d fled Egypt.

It would be an understatement to say that that first generation – the generation made up of the parents – had not lived up to its potential. You could say the same about most any generation, but this one set the record for bombing out. The whole lot, all except Joshua and Caleb, failed. Even Moses, Aaron, and Mariam – the leaders – were not permitted to enter the Promised Land.

Their generation had failed miserably. When they came out of Egypt, Moses led them to Mount Sinai where God had important matters to discuss with them. From there to the Promised Land, it should have taken them just a couple weeks, maybe a month if they took it slowly.  Instead, it took them 38 years! Enough for the generation that had messed up to die off and the next generation to grow up.

In some way, each generation is a disappointment to itself and to the next. We talk of the Greatest Generation because of the way they got out of the Great Depression and won World War II, but even they had their shortcomings. Almost without fail, parents disappoint children, leaders disappoint followers.

But few generations have disappointed as thoroughly as those who had experienced the first Passover. These former slaves had passed through the miracle of the Red Sea to freedom, only to languish and die in the Wilderness on the other side, far short of the Promised Land.

It is to the children of these “failures” – the second generation – that Moses is now speaking. And as he does, he uses a particular phrase – “as a father carries his son.”

Surely many a young man or woman listening to Moses at that very moment had been transported between those towering walls of Red Sea water in the arms or on the shoulders of a parent. And yet, just as surely, these same adult children were now looking back at hastily dug graves in forsaken wastelands, vivid memories reminding them how their parents had failed to carry them all the way.

Their parents had dropped the ball. They had failed in their parental responsibility to get their children all the way to safety, to their new home, to the Promised Land.

Why do people disappoint us? They don’t live up to our expectations. We expect our parents to nurture us and keep us safe. We expect our pastors and national leaders to have our best interest in mind. But far too often they fall way too short.

Sometimes our expectations are too high. Jody, a coworker in China, taught us the phrase, “low expectations, high happiness,” to help us get through difficult times. Barry & Alicia Chole shared with our China team the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and choice. We start out thinking idealistically about relationships. Then something comes along that throws us and we must choose whether and how we move forward.

If we lower our expectations too far, though, cynicism sets in. Cynicism, rampant in our culture and exacerbated every time leaders disappoint, is the loss of the ability to trust. We are a generation that is having our ability to trust destroyed. When we are no longer able to trust, relationships – family, ministry, work, civic life – are also destroyed.

But the alternative is no better. With self-reliance, a popular trait in our culture, we invariably wind up disappointing ourselves as well.

What then? What other option is there?

I chose the word “particular” to describe the phrase Moses used when speaking to that second generation because it was loaded with implications for them. “As a father carries his son” was a statement filled with disappointment and pain to his listeners. But now Moses was redeeming the phrase, giving it fresh meaning, a new expectation: Your forebears failed you miserably, but God will not.

Like that second generation, I too had been let down by my forebears. I had suffered unaccountable abuse at the hands of those who had heard from and spoken for God. Like that second generation, I was tempted to languish in a wilderness of resentment and self-pity. And now, I was letting myself down. I was falling into depression, a sure sign of failure, no?

Then in November 2006 as I read this passage in Deuteronomy, I heard Moses telling that second generation that they had a God, a parent figure, who would not disappoint. I heard him saying, God has carried you all the way until now, whether you recognize it or not. When your parents dropped you, God picked you up. He will never disappoint you. He will never, ever let you down. Even when it feels as though He has.

Just as Moses had told their parents, he was now telling them, “Do not be terrified, do not be afraid of what lies ahead.” Sure, they could make the same mistakes as those who had gone before them. They too could languish in the wilderness. Or they could forge a new path.

I too have been tempted to languish in a wilderness of resentment and self-pity. I have been tempted to give up and give in – as those before me had done. The choice is mine.

Yes, I am a victim of terrible abuse. I can – I have a right no less – to lash out at those who have gone before me. It is certainly not my fault what happened to me.

People disappoint. People fail us. Far too often, they fail miserably. I’ve been terribly disappointed by some of the most significant people in my life, a disappointment made starker by their towering strength of reputation and influence. How the mighty are fallen!

Here are words I wrote back in ’06 in the midst of my dark hour: “Father [I was referring to God] will not undo the past, nor will He erase it – though he may eventually heal the sting. But He promises to carry me, to get me through to the other side. And at this point in time – right now – the choice to be carried, to move forward, is entirely up to me. It has nothing to do with choices and victories and failures of my forefathers. It has all to do with me – just Father [God] and me.”

Even as I wrote those words, I’m not sure I knew where to go with them. It would take some time before I could really own them. Looking back nearly two decades later, I can see that God did carry me, that He did get me through to the other side. I was right that He would not undo the past, nor erase it. The past is what it is. But I can testify that He has healed the sting.

I didn’t stay in the wilderness of my forebears’ making. I chose to move on to the Promised Land of my Heavenly Father’s making. It was He who carried me there. He picked up where my forebears had failed.

Sometimes life is overwhelmingly disappointing. As my therapist taught me, it is good to feel that disappointment, to sit with it. But then he also taught me that it is good to turn to God and say, “Please carry me forward from here.”

As I read through those old notes, one more thought comes to mind. I have often considered that chapter in my life to be my lost years. I had been called to minister to others. Yet, how could I do so in such a state? Then I realized, looking at that long-lost Word doc, that I had still been teaching in the midst of that awful state. And now, as I read those notes today, they speak to me. They tell me that, even in my darkest hours, God still speaks through me.

My post last week, The anointing is never an excuse, is another take on my childhood abuse and the failings of leaders. As it was one of the most widely read posts I’ve ever written, it tells me there are a lot of people out there trying to make sense of leadership gone awry. I wrote that post as part of my series on Ethics.

I’m just a fellow traveler, not a therapist. But if these posts have spoken to you, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll certainly “lift you up to the throne,” as I like to say. You can write me at Contact Us!, the same webpage where you can sign up for free, if you haven’t already, to get my regular posts sent directly to your email.