When Life Goes East — pt 7: Practicing Hope in Disappointment
By ALISHA WISEMAN
Disappointment is something all of us experience. It’s the gap between what we long for and what actually happens.
It shows up in friendships that drift, careers that don’t unfold, opportunities that vanish, or prayers that seem to go unanswered. It is grief for what we hoped would be, but isn’t.
Holy Saturday
The Christian story names this experience in Holy Saturday. It’s the day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Friday is full of suffering and death. Sunday bursts with joy and new life. But Saturday is silence—the long stretch when God seems absent and promises look buried.
Most of life feels like this in-between. Saturday is the moment after you’ve prayed and nothing changed. It’s the emptiness after a funeral when everyone else moves on. It’s the weariness when you’ve failed again at something you swore you’d overcome.
This is where many of us live.
Three Ways to Live in Saturday
John Ortberg suggests we have three choices in this space: despair, denial, or waiting.
Despair resigns itself to Friday, giving up on hope altogether. Cynicism becomes a form of self-protection—it feels safer not to expect anything from God.
Denial skips ahead to Sunday, pretending resurrection has already come. It avoids pain with easy answers or spiritual clichés, but this isn’t real faith. It turns God into a formula for fixing problems.
Waiting is the third way. Waiting in Scripture is not passive—it’s active endurance and trust. Paul says creation “groans” for redemption (Rom 8:22–25). The psalmist longs for God “more than watchmen for the morning” (Ps 130:6). Waiting means holding grief and hope together, trusting God even when we don’t yet see the end of the story.
Waiting Well
So how do we wait well in the middle of disappointment? The biblical practice we’re given is lament.
Lament is telling the truth about our pain in the presence of God. It doesn’t minimise or tidy up our grief. The Psalms are full of it, and even Jesus cried out from the cross: “My God, why have You forsaken me?”
Job lamented unfiltered before God, and Scripture honours him for it—not because he had tidy answers, but because he brought his grief to God, not away from Him.
Lament can look like journaling, crying out in prayer, creating art, or tearing paper. It can be done in solitude or in community. The early church practised communal lament—naming pain together and carrying one another’s burdens. Far from weakening them, it made them resilient and tender.
Meeting God in the Middle
The story of the road to Emmaus shows us what happens in lament. Two disciples, heartbroken and disillusioned, admitted: “We had hoped he was the one.” In that moment of grief, Jesus came and walked with them, though they didn’t recognise Him. Resurrection was already at work, hidden in the ordinary.
In our disappointment, the better question may not be why did this happen? but where is God in this? The answer is: right here, walking with us.
God’s love can feel hard to accept, but He continually invites us to bring our pain closer to Him. Healing often comes slowly, but His presence transforms even the silence of Saturday.
A Simple Practice
Here’s one way of opening ourselves to God’s love in the midst of disappointment:
Be still – breathe slowly, notice your body and surroundings.
Imagine Jesus beside you – picture Him walking with you.
Name your disappointment – let Him ask, “What’s bothering you?”
Listen – notice His response, His gaze, His nearness.
Rest – let His presence be the gift, not the solution.
Pray: Jesus, thank You that You walk with us in disappointment as well as in joy. Teach us to wait well. Come, Holy Spirit. Meet us with Your love again.
Most of life is lived in Saturday. It’s not dramatic like Friday or triumphant like Sunday, but it’s where God meets us most tenderly. And that changes everything.