Article April 2, 2018 Issue

Gain victory over disappointment

Mark Swinney

How do we overcome the sting of disappointment—whether it be that we didn’t get a particular hoped-for job, or a close relationship breaks up, or we didn’t achieve the success in school or work for which we’d really striven? When things go wrong, big or small, there may come a temptation to just get mad or feel we are not worthy of love or anything good—and then, we feel stuck.

I’ll never forget an acquaintance of mine sharing that his score on his first engineering midterm in college was 12 percent. That was quite a disappointing start for someone who planned to major in engineering, and his professor advised him to drop the class and change his major. It was tempting to go off the deep end in frustration and just quit school altogether, but he knew he had it in him to continue on. Ultimately, not only was he successful in his undergraduate work, he ended up with a Ph.D. in engineering.

To me this has stood as a reminder that even when things seem down, we don’t need to feel helpless. At such times, I’ve found inspiration in biblical accounts of people who faced some really big disappointments (and worse), yet came through them victoriously.

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