Intention:
on-ramp to remembering God’s faithfulness and an off-ramp to burgeoning cynicism of impossibly doomed situations.
FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT, and in accordance with logic, let’s suppose now that “disillusionment” is in fact a positive term defining something good and desirable. What, then, could create the impression (in fact, the illusion) that it’s a hateful condition you’ll want to avoid at all costs? “Warren was a weary, disillusioned man.” Or, “The last time I saw her, Irina seemed depressed, regretful, disillusioned.” These sentences are readily understandable, and any reader who isn’t sociopathic will instantly empathize with both Warren and Irina. Everyone over a certain (very young) age has endured disillusionment and knows it to be an acutely painful sensation. “Sensation” is not nearly a strong enough word. We’re talking about a pain that can suffuse our very cells and rapidly metastasize into depression; a pain that seems, symptomatically, to have much in common with the knock-out body blow that a jilting, an abandonment, or other rejection can inflict. Perhaps disillusionment is a kind of jilting / rejection? It can leave us feeling we’ve been dropped by the world, existentially dumped; the cherished belief we were embracing like a lover has turned out to be a cheat, a false friend, a zero, and the pain of that epiphany is lonely and isolating. To be disillusioned is to be Dear Johned by a spectre. There we stand, ears scalding with shame as we realize how grotesquely we’d given ourselves to the illusion that something about ourselves or the world was true.2
Experience:
Music Industry
Film Industry
YouTube Following
Landmark
Demartini
Digital Nomad
$250k Contract
Psychedelics
Menache
Law School
Andrew Tate
North Korea Defector
Shelley Lubben
Crypto (Tether)
NFTs
Risks/symptoms of faint hope:
Aimless
Rudderless
Preoccupied (doom)
Circumstantial entrapment
Wrongful Obession (evil, fear)
Shrunken possibility
Small Mindset
Cynicism
Self-pity
Self-absorption
Inward Obsession (no service)
Antidotes:
“this step of looking upward to God led me to look outward to my neighbors and the beauty around us, and this journey began to renew my hope, helping me transcend my self-absorption”
Shared stories
Loving/loved neighbours
Community/Tribe
The journey to cynicism accelerates when we grow preoccupied with the wrong things. A crisis tempts us to turn inward, but it also invites us to expand our worlds, to share our unfiltered complaints with God, to grow our compassion, and, in the process, to turn upward and notice how our problems and preoccupations become smaller as we do. If we’re open to it, we can be reminded of God’s provision—even in a crisis—and, from that place of confidence in God’s provision, extend that provision to those around us. What if we all think about ourselves a little less? What if we give ourselves the gift of getting over ourselves? Habakkuk looked beyond his circumstances and reminded himself that God never fails. That God can renew our hope. Though disillusionment may be the inevitable outcome of our expectations and experiences colliding, what follows hinges on our decision to turn inward or upward.
Beyond Ourselves
“Our disillusionment is not a bad thing,” writes theologian Barbara Brown Taylor. “Take the word apart and you can begin to hear what it really means. Dis-illusion-ment. The loss of illusion. The end of make-believe. Is that a bad thing? Or a good thing? To learn that God’s presence is not something we can demand, that God’s job is not to reward our devotion, that God’s agenda may in fact be quite different from our own. Is that a bad thing or a good thing to know?”8
Cynicism’s illusion : blame
When we encounter church leaders obsessed with political ideologies or abusing their power or practicing all flavors of hypocrisy, we’re ready to join Jo Anne in writing off the Church. When the next scandal makes headlines, we feel our hope eroding. We feel a sense of personal superiority bubbling up within us, our anger at the new injustice seeding our growing cynicism. In a paradoxical way, cynicism appears to be the plague of what others are or are not doing. But at its core, cynicism is a byproduct of pride. It is a disbelief that positive change is possible based on our assessment of our own strength to enact that positive change. Yet in the operating room of Jo Anne’s heart, God revealed He was the only reliable source of enduring hope.
Idolatry
We’ve asserted in the preceding chapters that disillusionment is a gift. That’s because disillusionment shatters the illusion—the idol—of self-sufficiency. This is when God reminds us that He has been there all along, inviting us to look not inward—to our finite abilities—but upward. As Kyle Idleman argues in Don’t Give Up, “The point of defeat . . . seems like the most desolate corner of creation. [But] it actually places you in prime position to experience God’s strength and provision because, as it turns out, God is drawn to the desperate.”6 And the desperate are drawn to God.
Gift:
The challenges shattered Farai’s idealism about church service, yet God used this pain to deepen faith, resilience, and commitment: signs that He was at work through this crisis. With the gift of hindsight, Farai concludes, “These challenges helped us know who we are and our purpose in life.”
Possibility:
This path to true and enduring hope brought courage in the face of persecution—the ability to stand firm in fear. Both then and now, faith grows in suffering as we learn to trust God and His redemptive plan for our lives and contexts. When all seemed to be lost for Jeremiah and for Israel, when God “takes away what is treasured but has become unacceptable,” He makes a “new form of life possible in the world, just when all seemed ended and beyond recall.”13
The question remains, what leads us to this type of enduring hope? What helps us look up? The answers are unexpected and uncomfortable—suffering, surrender, and commitment.
Danger:
The temptation to draw our hope from the wrong sources threatens us. We are misguided when we place our confidence in our circumstances and our success. When our hope is contingent on our abilities or when we assess our message based on the response it receives. We “trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the LORD.”