last kid picked for kickball: stewarding disappointment well

I was waiting for an email. Refreshing my inbox, every hour or two, for days straight.

If it said, “we want you,” it would become the answer to so many prayers. My dream job would become my job. The future would clear up, the unknowns would finally disappear, and my exhilaration would be an understatement.

A couple weeks before, I had been invited in for an interview. They said I should hear from them before the weekend was up, but Friday moseyed past, then Saturday, and finally Sunday.

I’ve had a few dream job interviews in the past year and a half, and none of them have panned out. So while optimism and hope explode in one part of my brain every time the dream job tiptoes within reach, another layer of my mind is icy and cynical, ever realistic, and dampening: “But what if you don’t get the job?” If I didn’t, I’d be back to the drawing board, back to spending hours on freshly-tailored, uniquely-specified-to-the-company job applications that I might never hear back from. Back in the dark, not knowing, not in control. (And that’s what really gets me, isn’t it? That I don’t have control. That I am not in God’s shoes.)

As much as I wanted that email to appear in my mailbox, I also didn’t. I was afraid to know, afraid knowing would kill the hope. I wanted to let it live, to think, “This could be it” for as long as I could. I was afraid of the outcome, afraid of being passed over again for someone else with more experience.

There is no way around it; every “we went with another candidate” message stings with disappointment, no matter how kindly said. Did you ever play neighborhood kickball when you were a kid? Team captains would select their teams, one by one, and someone always had to be the last person picked. I was usually not the last one, but sometimes I was among the stragglers at the bottom of the picks pile. It’s never fun to be picked last. But this is life, and it just happens on a larger scale with jobs.

I am writing this from the “last kid picked for kickball” side of things.

I wanted to give this preliminary introduction to show you that I am still in the waiting, and the answers are still on the other side, as I write this. And as someone who loves security, it’s hard for me, this perpetual not-knowing. I am still in the dark, still not sure how many more jobs I will apply for, not sure how many more interviews will ask for my time, effort, and hope.

Because the email came on Tuesday, and it said what I begged it not to say:

“We have decided to move forward with another candidate.”

So as you read this, keep that in mind. It’s easy to say “God has a plan,” but it’s hard to receive that from someone who knows what God’s plan for them is, from someone who has their dream job, from someone who has everything you want.

When my ghostwriting job ends in December, I have nothing lined up next. I have a whole lot of rejection emails and unfulfilled desires in my back pocket. I have so many questions that God has not answered.

I want you to hear me, with my hands full of what I perceive as failures and disappointments, tell you what I’m learning to believe: that even right now, at this moment, without the security my heart wants, the dream job, or the proof of God working, there is joy. And this, these disappointments and the uncertainties of the future, are a good gift from a kind God.

I listened to a podcast by David Platt the other day about contentment. He was talking about how our joy isn’t dependent on anything we have or anything external, but rather on having and pursuing Christ as the goal of our lives. He said it this way:

If Jesus is the goal, then suffering is gain.

If Jesus is my treasure, then anything that brings me closer to Him is gain.

(But only if Jesus is my goal and treasure.)

Disappointment, I think, is a kind of suffering. So if Jesus is my goal, then disappointment is gain. I’m an expert at losing sight of the goal. I get my hands all over things I want and try to make them my own. But I need you to see that I wasn’t (you weren’t) created to own; I was (you were) created to steward.

It’s Not Mine

It was 2019. That summer was one where God impressed this understanding on my heart: everything I have belongs to Him. That makes me a steward of the things that I have, whether they are gifts, skills, possessions, relationships, or circumstances. It makes me a steward of life, which removes my right to tell God what He should do with what already belongs to Him.

But guys, this understanding, coupled with a deep, deep promise of God, changes everything about how you view life.

Here’s the promise: everything you need, for life and for godliness (2 Peter 1:3). God vows that.

Everything you need. For life. For godliness. And I’m learning I can hold Him to that promise. I can say it back to Him. I can remind Him of it. But when I do, I’m really just reminding me of it, because it’s not like He forgot, or deviated from it, or failed to do it. God doesn’t forget. And He doesn’t change. He’s perfect in faithfulness, unlike the rest of us.

He is always upholding the promise, actively providing what I need for life and godliness.

How that relates to stewardship is simple: anything that’s given to me isn’t mine. And if it’s taken, then I don’t need it for life or for godliness. God may deny me a lot of things I perceive as good in this life, but I can rest in this promise of His.

Obedience, Not Results

There’s another layer to this stewardship: as a steward, I am responsible for obedience, not results. Joseph is the best example of this that I can think of. He was entrusted with the responsibility of caring for all that Potiphar had, but clearly it did not belong to him. It belonged to Potiphar. Then Potiphar’s wife came along. You probably know the story.

Did Joseph fail in stewardship because he couldn’t control Potiphar’s wife? Of course not. Despite his faithfulness to Potiphar--in fact, because of his faithfulness to Potiphar--Joseph lost his position as a steward. He was thrown into jail because of the lies of a jilted Potiphar’s wife. Because of his refusal to take what didn’t belong to him. He suffered because he was a good steward.

He suffered for his obedience and faithfulness, and the results were detrimental, but not because he had failed.

So here’s this layer of stewardship: what you steward, you don’t control. And that’s okay. That’s where you find all the freedom, peace, and joy in stewardship.

Because at the end of the day, the owner is responsible for the results, while the steward is responsible simply for the obedience.

I don’t know what stewardship looks like for you. For me, over the past year or so, it’s looked like obedience in applying for jobs, interviewing, ghostwriting three books (not done yet), investing in people in my community, serving in my church, and studying the Word. For you, it could look like being faithful with quizzes/tests/projects, cleaning your bathroom, sticking people with needles in the ER, or showing up to work on time every day. A lot of the time, stewardship doesn’t feel heroic or extraordinary. Faithfulness is often the color of the ordinary. It is often dressed in silence and overlooked.

But what about when stewardship feels like failure, not obedience?

Stewarding the Thing You Didn't Want

As my windshield wipers were going and the rain was coming down on the glass while I drove to my most recent dream job interview, three words came to my mind:

stewarding disappointment well.

To be honest, I’ve had a lot of disappointments over the past year. Disappointment is just part of life, but it’s just not my favorite part. But it, too, is something to steward.

And disappointment does not mean you’ve failed. If you’re going to steward failure, losses, and disappointments, you’ll have to focus not on the effort that feels worthless, but on the obedience that results in the effort. Results are not mine to produce; that is God’s role and choice.

I have stewarded a lot of disappointments, but I don’t know how many I’ve stewarded well. To steward disappointment well, there must be trust, and a belief that God has my good in His mind, and the confident expectation that He has not forgotten me, and that He has not erased meaning from my life. And to steward disappointment well, my treasure has to be Jesus, not that thing that I want.

Although I want this, whatever ‘this’ might be, stewardship is the realization that maybe loss, maybe failure, maybe the thing you didn’t want—maybe it’s the thing God wants you to hold in your hands or heart, to be obedient in, to bear the weight of. And if He does, stewardship is the joy of realizing that God’s grace is enough to carry your feet in the suffering, the hurt, or the difficulty of being entrusted with a thing you did not want. Even in my disappointments, He is getting glory—this is a thing worth stewarding.

Joseph stewarded prison.

Ruth stewarded the loss of her husband and home.

Daniel stewarded exile.

David stewarded a throne.

Job stewarded pain.

Paul stewarded danger, hunger, cold, and the churches (2 Corinthians 11).

Truth be told, when it occurred to me that maybe God is asking me to steward all the disappointment, an overwhelming sense of rest came over me. Maybe that’s what grace feels like. Because I remembered that God will have His way, and that every good gift is from God and every withheld thing is not His good gift for me. Disappointment didn’t feel like something that had happened to me anymore; it felt like something that had been given to me.

A verse I have clung to since graduating college is this:

“But he is unchangeable, and who can turn Him back? What he desires, that He does. For he will complete what he appoints for me, and many such things are in his mind.”

(Job 23:13-14)

When Job said that, he was talking about what God would do in his life—but he was in the thick of suffering, not wealth and joy. God had a plan, and Job wasn’t weak or strong enough to mess it up.

Ephesians 2:10 tells me something else:

“For we are His workmanship (product, thing made), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Somewhere along the way, I started to believe that maybe God didn’t have a plan, that maybe I had to make the plan. But I don’t. And He does. Ephesians 2:10 is the proof.

It says God prepared beforehand the good works for me to do. That means there is purpose written, etched, ingrained into my existence. Before my lungs ever inhaled oxygen for the first time, God knew what He wanted me to spend my life doing. All the labor, all the good, all that was valuable in it. God, who is sovereign, who has all power and authority, already knows what I will occupy my life with. He is the One who ordained it. So if the plan is for me to steward disappointment again, I want to do that well.

I don’t have to know what God’s plan is to be able to steward it well. I just have to wake up and ask, “How can I be faithful today? How can I be obedient?”

As for the disappointments, whatever drives me to God is a good thing and a gift. I learn the lesson of His sufficiency and satisfaction over and over again, in a hundred different ways. I wish that it would stick. But maybe the need, the lack, is the gift itself, because it is what ever draws me to Him.

My disappointments are teaching me, again and again, that Jesus is the real treasure.