Blessed are the Frustrated

Blessed are the Frustrated
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Frustration is the pain that comes from the thwarting of our will. It is a frequent experience in the lives of all human beings and believers are by no means immune. Frustration is one of the potentially negative byproducts inherent in being imperfect creatures living in a fallen world. We want what would seem to make us happy, and we want it now. The world, however, does not cooperate.

Neither does God.

There are degrees of frustration. Daily events bring us the smaller kind; the traffic jams up, the computer goes down, a seemingly simple business call turns into a marathon session of “Muzak” initiated by recorded voices. But the thwarting of our will takes on a more disturbing aspect when it is attached to the larger issues of life. Someone waits for endless and seemingly futile years to meet a potential spouse, an illness lingers despite the best efforts to heal body or mind, an aspiring writer experiences rejection letter after rejection letter; these are frustrations with a capital “F”. With these change happens at what seems like a glacial pace and the pain of them is far worse than that of being hung-up at a railroad crossing in a car.

The primary temptation the Christian faces here is to give up. Perseverance is a biblical virtue but it never comes easily to the instantly gratified children of the 21st Century Western Church. In trying to develop a right attitude towards such “long-suffering” we are, today, especially prone to lose heart.

In dealing with this reality it might help us to know that God is both sovereign and sovereignly good to us. He knows the difference between what we need and what we want. He knows that some things are kept from us for our own protection. There is truth to the hoary old evangelical cliché, “rejection is often God’s protection”. Even if something deeply desired will ultimately be good in our lives the Lord may make us wait for it for the sake of building character in us. He, Himself, is long-suffering and if we would follow Christ, longing to be made like Him, we too must bear the cross of delayed gratification. Frustrations, big and small, are part of the crucible of pain which we must all endure for the character of God to be forged in us.

The truth is that it is better to be frustrated in the short term than to be immediately gratified to our soul’s hurt in the long term. This is a hard lesson to learn but, as with all the others our Lord wills to teach us, it is we who will be blessed at lesson’s end.