Being Thankful for Disappointment

Because the story is bigger than what I can see

Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday because of its present-tenseness. While I understand Thanksgiving harkens back to the historic feast shared by Pilgrims and Native Americans, I find this holiday stirs up a present understanding of how God’s blessed me in the recent past. And for this reason, Thanksgiving always feels fresh to me no matter how many plates of turkey and stuffing I eat year after year.

In my family, we grew up with a tradition of going around the room and dropping kernels of corn into a tin as we named specific things from the past year for which we felt grateful. This was always difficult for me because we only got two or three kernels, and I wanted to say something good. I really needed more like two or three ears of corn, but I suppose the food would have gotten cold by the time I would have finished.

Of course, there were certain things which always made the Thanksgiving kernels:

• God’s presence and provision

• Family

• Friends

• Freedom

• Health

And this year there have been some more quirky items on the list:

• My pigs FINALLY staying in their paddock (v. in the ditch outside the fence and needing me to carry them to safety)

• My emaciated goat gaining 20 lbs and going from “Fatally Anemic” to only “Dangerously Anemic.” Progress is progress, people.

• Cow #2 getting bred (hopefully) and giving a little milk now as we await a calf

• Discovering duck eggs with green yolks are perfectly edible. (Apparently when ducks eat acorns, there’s a chemical reaction between the sulphur and tannins. Still taste the same … if you close your eyes.)

• Finding a place to get half-priced hay

• Making elderberry potions from a bush I almost cut down

• Getting arm muscles from using a pitchfork every day

• Getting a new septic system (It only takes a few days of not being able to wash your clothes or flush a toilet to make you truly grateful for modern plumbing.)

• Finding a beautiful replacement bone china teapot for only $15 at a local antiques store

• My husband and brother in-law fixing my broken tea cart

• My self-cut hair style not looking horrible

• Time for tea even when there’s a lot going on

As I was pondering these and other things I’ve enjoyed over my past year/past life, I realized something I hadn’t thought much about before. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and have the advantage of more hindsight, but I realized I am deeply grateful for not only my blessings but also for a few key disappointments which have ultimately altered my life for the better.

Most of these disappointments have been me basically not getting my own way in my own timing. In short, it’s disappointing to discover I am not God. And while painful at the time, these discoveries have been healthy for my spiritual, physical, and emotional life.

I’ll give you three examples.

Back in college, I was truly smitten with a certain talented pianist. He was kind, quiet, spiritually mature, and a singer to boot. His only “flaw” was not thinking I was the one for him. I spent a year agonizing over what he thought of me and tried to woo him with my own charm and (ahem) authentic character.

It didn’t work. He never pursued me, and I and my friends struggled to understand why. But months later I started dating Jason Mitchell, and the rest we literally wrote a book about.

Now in the moment of disappointment, I had no idea what the future would hold. All I knew was rejection stung, and my prospects for romance seemed pretty pitiful. But I started pouring out my heart more to my Maker and definitely got stretched in the trust department. Such experiences are never wasted. And now, five children and nearly 18 years of marriage later, I am incredibly thankful for my husband even though he can only play one hymn in addition to Pachelbel’s Canon on the piano.

The second example of a more recent disappointment would be last year’s hunt for a homestead. Again, prospects for a house which would a) fit our whole family, b) be close enough to Jason’s job, c) have enough land for animals, and d) be in our price range were slim. For an entire season (which felt wearily long while we were in it), we took up the hobby of placing offers on potential homes and watching them fall through. And each time they fell, so did my hopes. I sincerely grieved over each loss as the keys to one dream house after another slipped through my metaphorical fingers.

Photo by Paul Kapischka on Unsplash

But truth be told, I hadn’t gone house-hunting alone. Ultimately, I wanted to be (and our family to be) where we were supposed to go. I’d tried manipulation in my pursuit of the college pianist, and it hadn’t worked. I wanted some assurance from above that if we were supposed to move, the details would come together without me trying to force them.

And thankfully, eventually they did. I just knew when we drove up to a certain house with acreage we would not get it. It was too pretty, and there were too many others looking at it. We dutifully put in the offer only to be informed that someone else had gotten the property under contract. Bummer, but not surprising. However, a month later, we received the call that the original contract had fallen through, and the house was ours if we still wanted it.

It’s been an adventurous year settling in and acquiring our animals, but I am far happier here than I would have been at any of the other homes we tried to buy. (One was really close to a train crossing, and another didn’t have quite enough land to allow us to get animals.) So in retrospect, I am very thankful for those initial house-hunting disappointments.

My final disappointment for which I am truly grateful is the fact I failed to find a publisher for my novels for so long. After self-publishing my books back in 2012, I wanted to give traditional publishing a try for my murder mysteries. I submitted to 55 literary agents and actually got one! But alas, she could not find a publisher for my book. She suggested I write something new, and that’s how my sci-fi novel, Ephemeral, came into being.

Unfortunately, my agent did not represent sci-fi, so we parted ways. Now that I had a new book in a new genre, I tried another round of submissions — this time to 65 literary agents and small publishers. The result? Crickets.

Photo by Katja Anokhina on Unsplash

I felt truly discouraged. I was being faithful in my writing and doing all the right things, so why wasn’t I getting any results? There may have been a few tears shed at my keyboard over this. But again, I wanted to be working with a publisher who would do good work and not pressure me to write against my conscience.

When two friends separately encouraged me to submit to Bandersnatch Books in the same week, I took that as Providential direction and even rewrote my sci-fi novel as a YA novel to better fit the publisher parameters. Then on a whim, I also submitted my old murder mysteries to basically show I could be versatile. The irony is, they offered the book contract for my cozy mysteries — not my serious sci fi. It took 11 years, but I am so thankful for the women I’m now working with that I can honestly say I’m grateful for the publishing disappointments I’ve had — all 120 of them.

Now, I am not suggesting that all disappointments are created equal or that failure in one area means immanent success just around the corner. Some problems are never solved, illnesses never cured, and hearts not wholly healed this side of heaven. Nor are we promised that we will ever be granted all the reasons why we were allowed to experience certain disappointments in life. (See the book of Job in the Bible.)

My greatest hope in this life is not that all my dreams come true, but rather that I can trust and relate to my Creator as He has both experienced the disappointments of this world and promised to make all things new.

And for this, I am most thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving!