DISAPPOINTMENT/ DISCOURAGEMENT

Heaviness in the heart of a man maketh it stop… Proverbs 12:25

Disappointment is one of the most excruciating emotions of human living, and leaves a livid scar on the human psyche. Harsher disappointments of life ordinarily break the human spirit. You should fervently pray for the tonic of encouragement and the cloak of comfort for all those who slough through the disappointments of life.

Many years back, I merely had a dream to become a writer. Then I completed my first manuscript titled Sins of Deeds, a novel for adolescents, and I dispatched it to a popular publishing company for consideration. The manuscript was to stay there for a long drawn eighteen months, before being sent back together with a politely worded rejection slip. This time span in addition to the between five to six years it took to complete the work, as I commenced testing the unfamiliar waters of writing. I was disappointed, and gravely so. However, I thought my case was a dampener until I read about people who had a collection of rejection slips they decorated toilets with them!

Not to know discouragement is to be spared one of the most aggravating and traumatic occurrences. Discouragement, apart from physical death, can turn out a lethal vision-killer. As long as you hold back from toppling into the cesspool of discouragement via the freeway of disappointment then your vision could always be revived. From that point you simply do a U-turn, by the strength of the Lord.

INDIFFERENCE/APATHY

“The death of your dream will not be accomplished by a major failure. Its death will come from indifference and apathy”, wrote John Mason, President and Founder of Insight International.

Lack of ability or technical know-how is not even nearly as fatal. Apathy and indifference to vision is a terrible thing. That point is arrived at when you plan too long and too wrong. Or when you spend inordinate time at the obnoxious wasteland of disappointment, or wallow in the cesspool of discouragement. You may even begin to imagine that you are saving yourself from the hassles of life by sitting on the cosy fence of indifference. I can assure you if you should topple from that fence, great would be your fall.

You dare not be indifferent about potential. With all your might resist the shackles of apathy.

An American President was so struck by the phenomenon that he remarked:

_ ‘For better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much or suffer much because they live in the great twilight that knows not victory nor defeat’._

UNINFORMED COUNSEL

Ours is not a society given to advancing utterly sincere counsel. Rather we are more readily given to scandals and condemnation. Believers who are yet to be grounded in the Word would rather condemn than offer God-divined counsel. They would readily reduce to malicious insignificance or malign the gifts, and dreams, and aspirations of others. And where they choose to counsel, it would be at best empty and bereft of good faith.

One day, I showed to a friend and older acquaintance of mine a poem that I had intended to be published as a scriptural gift item. Of this particular piece, I was elated. It seemed to me an accomplished piece of writing that I had revised and rewritten so much I felt it could not get any better. What would I have? My feelings notwithstanding, the opening statement of this man was anything but commending. Even before he had read the poem, he said it was too long! He went on to explain how people generally do not read long poems!

It was much later that I began to ponder his response in quiet contemplation. As you can imagine, a deluge of begging questions arose in my mind. How did the fellow know people did not read long poems? Had he ever carried out a survey of people’s poems preferences or habits of reading these preferences? Could a one-stanza poem with about twenty lines be rightly described as too long? Is the Songs of Solomon any shorter? More questions crowded into my mind, and I discovered that I could not answer any of them in the affirmative.

Eventually, the realization dawned on me this was one of those commonplace instances when someone, out of his own personal predisposition, made a sweeping generalization, which was capable of deterring another person’s aspirations. There are a multitude of associates, acquaintances, relations, friends, mentors and opinion leaders like him who equally, and sometimes by far worse utterances, bring about irreversible harm to others aspirations.

My friend had, in fact, been hazarding a guess! Several glorious destinies have been truncated with such careless utterance!

Never seek counsel from an uninformed source. Even if the source is informed, “test every spirit”. People have varying compulsions, motives and completely unrelated perspectives. Someone who even though genuinely likes your person may feel loath to hurt your feelings by telling the bitter truth. But, child of God, you are entitled to the truth, bitter or not, if it leads to the sweetness of a better and brighter future. You are fundamentally entitled to sound counsel. It is your fundamental Christian entitlement!

Do not believe otherwise even when it seems more expedient so to do!

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