I’ve found a space in my home where I can sit at my desk, look out the window, and see my street below, framed by the beautiful crepe myrtles that welcome you into our driveway. In the mornings, the trees are often filled with birds, and I find myself pausing to watch them before I begin my day.

It’s peaceful, and I have fallen in love with this quiet little space. There is something about sitting here that makes me feel hopeful, seen, and rested. It has become a place where I can slow down, listen, and have honest conversations with God.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you may remember a piece I wrote called “I Had Hoped.” It was my attempt to put words to something I think many of us carry quietly, the things we hoped would look different than they do.

I had hoped I might be a better writer by now. I know I’ve grown, but it’s not quite where I imagined it would be. I had hoped my family would live closer together, but instead, my boys live in California. These aren’t the kind of disappointments we would compare to a diagnosis or a death, but they still matter. And after a lifetime of small disappointments, you begin to feel their weight when you look toward the future.

It’s not quite as easy to feel hopeful, at least not without the shadow of doubt lingering close by.

I had hoped…

So I started asking myself: What is at the root of our disappointments?

For me, disappointment comes when life, a season, or even a decision doesn’t unfold the way I thought it would—the way I hoped it would, prayed it would, expected it would.

And that made me ask: What is disappointment except the result of unmet expectations?

But as I sat with that question, I realized it led me somewhere uncomfortable. If disappointment comes from unmet expectations, does that mean the answer is to lower my expectations? To stop hoping so deeply so I won’t hurt so deeply?

That didn’t feel right. Maybe the answer isn’t lowering our expectations but asking the deeper question beneath them.

Here is where I find the tension: God repeatedly invites us to pray boldly, to ask with persistence. The Bible doesn’t tell us to protect ourselves from disappointment by expecting less.

So what do we do when we bring our deepest hopes to God, and He doesn’t answer in the way we prayed He would?

That’s where the question becomes much more uncomfortable.

I remember praying so hard when my mom was ill. We prayed for healing. We prayed for more time. Ultimately, when she passed away, I was left with the very difficult question: “Why didn’t God answer my prayers?”

I believed God heard the prayers of His children, and I was one of them. So why didn’t He heal her? I know this is an unanswerable question, but in the middle of my grief, it didn’t feel like a theological question. It felt like a deep disappointment.

And this is where disappointment becomes so complicated. If I pray for reconciliation and instead experience heartbreak, because I believe God could have prevented it, my disappointment naturally lands on Him.

I don’t feel like we talk about this enough in Christian circles. It almost feels taboo to admit you’re disappointed in God. It can feel like an admission of spiritual immaturity, as if a faithful Christian should never wrestle with questions like these.

But disappointment admits something important: there was something we deeply hoped for and fervently prayed for, and it didn’t happen. And when that happens, it can feel as though we are questioning God Himself.

But maybe what we’re really questioning is our understanding of His goodness. If God is good, and I believe He is, why does His goodness sometimes look so different from what I imagined?

I don’t think I realized until recently how much disappointment has affected my prayers. When I was younger, when life still felt like it was unfolding before me and hope seemed to pulse through my veins, my prayers were bolder and more fervent. I prayed for others with a confidence that God heard me, that He was at work, and that I could trust Him with the outcome.

But over time, my prayers became more hesitant, less passionate, almost like I was holding one hand behind my back. Sometimes I would pray, “God’s will be done,” not only as an act of surrender, but as a way of protecting my heart from the possibility of disappointment.

Disappointment changed me.

Not because I stopped believing in God.
Not because I stopped trusting that He was good.
But because I discovered what it felt like to hope deeply and still experience loss.

This is so tender for me. It’s only recently that I realized my prayers are more guarded than they used to be.

My first reaction was to try to “fix” the problem. Pray harder. Believe harder. Try harder. Do you see the theme?

But what I’m beginning to understand is that my disappointment doesn’t need to be fixed before I bring it to God. I don’t need to control it. I just need to be honest about it.

God doesn’t need me to perform my way back to Him; He invites me to bring Him the truth of where I am.

I am learning that faith doesn’t require me to pretend I wasn’t hoping for something. It doesn’t require me to pretend I wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t happen. Maybe honesty is not the opposite of faith. Maybe honesty is where deeper faith begins.

For a long time, I think I confused reverence with hiding. I thought honoring God meant only bringing Him the parts of my heart that looked faithful. But the parts of my heart I was trying to hide were never hidden from Him.

We don’t bring our disappointment to God because He needs to know how we feel. He already knows. We bring it to Him because honesty is where intimacy begins. We cannot have a deep relationship with someone we feel we have to hide from.

Lately, I’ve been putting this into practice. I tell God everything. Seriously, everything. I talk to Him while I’m cleaning, I talk to Him in the grocery store, and I tell Him exactly how I feel, not just the good stuff. And you know what? I feel so much freer than I have in a while. Not because I haven’t been disappointed, but because I have, and I finally know where to take it.