What if it starts with disappointment?
When i’m coaching clients inside of challenging & complex circumstances — let’s call it life — it’s not uncommon to need a few rounds down the clarity spiral before we’re able to name the thing.
The work.
The obstacle.
The gap.
The paralyzing soundtrack.
Disappointment was the word, on this particular day. And the sister before me — humble + deep + wise — had worked hard to get there.
Having spent 18 months in fierce service of others — simultaneously honing her own growth along the way — this one had taken every brave step, owned every messy try, and mastered every last route to resilience.
She was a shock-absorber
She was a force.
She was a faithful servant.
And she was spent — with nothing to show for it. Indeed, nearly every outcome she’d aimed at was nowhere in sight: parenting + work + health + spiritual impact.
She felt silly. How could she have spent so much of herself for so little in return?
By now, our coaching session was days in the rear-view mirror, but her story wouldn’t leave me alone — her presence, her honesty, her voice, her pain. Days before, i’d stepped into my favorite, cozy advent ritual: retelling and imaginatively reliving the birth narrative of Jesus. We’d just started in — me and Luke and King Herod — when, for the first time in my life, Zechariah jumped off the page.
By all accounts, he’s been a one-dimensional character in my own retelling of the story — a peripheral cast member barely on-stage and quickly forgotten in the nativity drama. But on this day, standing as proxy for the client who wouldn’t leave me alone, Zechariah came to life.
He was, i began to see, a man who had done all the right things in all the right ways, with little to show…
A priest in service for decades who had never officiated in the Holy Place, the highest act of mediation — despite daily lots cast.
A man who, despite noble marriage partnership, had never been able to bear a child.
Perhaps it’s an understatement to say that — when we meet Zechariah in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel — he is a man familiar with prolonged disappointment. Deferred hope … his long-time home.
As my advent reading opened a path for me to walk imaginatively alongside this priest into the Holy Place — the irony of my years-long dismissal of him percolating — i was perhaps as astonished as he was to hear the words of the angel Gabriel:
Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John [the Baptist]. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord …
We hold so many mysteries as we tend to our lives — the absurdity of meaning-making when all the storylines have come undone. In nearly every way, and certainly on more than one occasion, we must reckon with the sacred stewardship of seeing only in part.
But this year, I’ve become aware of a deeper revelation unfolding here in Luke — an illuminating truth one layer beneath our self-referential storylines — an advent insight that Zechariah was forced to reckon with: a God who decided to start with disappointment.
Amidst all the mysteries wrapped up inside of people, place, and time, the Good News, as it turns out, knocked first on that door — surprising the resigned, pursuing the downcast, promising to the deeply disappointed. It’s almost as if God had been waiting to meet up there. Dashed hopes, dead-ends, difficulties — trivial & tragic? Good. Now hear the Gospel hope beckoning you into a bigger, truer, more eternal story.
What it might it mean, Zachariah surely must have pondered, to meet a Messiah who starts His story here?
A silent God who had seemingly disappeared — word & deed — for 400+ years. And then His first steps on-scene are a glorious revelation of unimaginable promises to one man in the depths of disappointment inside the obscurity of a priestly call, who was silenced shortly thereafter — made mute — to think it all over for the next nine months.
I won’t pretend to understand it.
But I can’t help but to think of a sister I know who needs desperately, right now, to know a God who is capable of companionship inside the hard + hidden places of deep disappointment. Somehow — strange as it seems — she’s right where she wants to be.